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Newsletter

LLW 2024 +++ YH4F interviews +++ Ada in France

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May comes with legal news such as the Legal & Licensing Workshop and the Bitcoin lawsuit regarding the liability of Free Software developers. We also talked to two 2023 YH4F participants and our Danish local group sent an Open Letter to their parliament. Did you see that Ada & Zangemann won a prize and that the French ebook version is now available?

Picture collage showing an YH4F illustration, the Ada & Zangemann book with the French award and an image of the LLW registration desk with the LLW logo

Table of contents

Quote of the Month

"As in our democracies, the distribution of power in the field of technology is essential. And we need to show that an inclusive path is possible".

-Matthias Kirschner, thanking the Forum InCyber for the prize given to Ada & Zangemann.

LLW 2024: A forum for difficult legal topics of Free Software in Gothenburg

For the second year in a row, the Swedish city of Gothenburg hosted an edition of the Free Software Legal & Licensing Workshop (LLW), the annual conference for the Legal Network members. The 2024 edition brought new faces and great discussions and presentations on current legal and licensing issues related to technological developments such as AI.

Meet Antoni and Tobias, YH4F participants

Find out more about the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom participants of the 2023 edition. We are continuing this series talking with Antoni and Tobias: Antoni developed a dictionary to preserve endangered languages, and Tobias conceived a rich featured calendar.

Free Software developers' liability and the Bitcoin lawsuit

Free Software is everywhere, with studies estimating that it is present in about 96% of the applications that we use. But what are the responsibilities and liabilities of the Free Software developers? A potential threat to Free Software developers looms in the form of an ongoing lawsuit in the UK involving Bitcoin and its core developers.

Find more about it

Ada & Zangemann: news from France

Danish local group initiative

The FSFE Danish local group has sent an Open Letter to the IT spokespersons of all the political parties in the Danish Parliament, entitled “Digitalisation problems can be solved with Free/Open Source Software”. In this letter, the local group pointed out several examples of cases in which using proprietary software is harming citizens’ rights and privacy, for example the municipalities' strong wish to use proprietary software (Google Classroom) in schools, which is actively sharing students' private data to Google in violation of the GDPR.

The local group is currently waiting for an official answer from the parliamentarians though they have already received positive responses.

You can check the letter (in Danish) here.

Germany: Public TV broadcasters announce ‘Streaming OS’ as Free Software

The German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF have announced that they will integrate their media centres in future and publish their code as Free Software. Under the name ‘Streaming OS’, the software will be available to the general public under a Free Software licence.

In their announcement, the directors of the broadcasters emphasise that by publishing the code, they want to give something back to society that it has previously paid for. ARD and ZDF are thus addressing the core idea of our FSFE initiative ‘Public Money? Public Code!’. We are looking forward to seeing Streaming OS and its code in 2025!

The Berlin group of the FSFE participated in the 2024 edition of the Umweltsfestival (Environmental Festival) together with Bits&Bäume Berlin and KDE Eco. Our volunteers explained to festival attendees the sustainable use of computers with Free Software as well as other FSFE initiatives such as Public Money, Public Code and even answered questions about the Fediverse.

Get involved: organize an Ada & Zangemann reading!

Do you want to help spread the word about Free Software to the *****er generations? You can do it with an Ada & Zangemann reading! If you like *****ren, this is an easy and a great way to talk to them about Free Software. And everyone who has done it has found it a really rewarding and enriching experience!

If you are interested in facilitating a reading of the book in schools or libraries, write to contact@fsfe.org.

Contribute to our Newsletter

We would love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts, pictures, or news to share, please send them to us at [email protected]. You can also support us, contribute to our work, and join our community. We would like to thank our community and all the volunteers, supporters, and donors who make our work possible, with a special mention to our translators who make it possible for you to read this newsletter in your mother tongue.

Your editor,
Ana