1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa 2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows 3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium) 4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland) 5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli 6. System administration murphy weeks 7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
Making Free Software projects legally maintainable is increasingly important. This includes maintaining the ability to relicence, ensure licence compliance, and to ensure clean copyright.
FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment carefully crafted to help Free Software projects consolidate their copyright to a single organisation or person.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html
The FLA was originally developed and released in 2002 with a grant to allow people use the agreement for their own purposes. FSFE has now released a new revision of the FLA under the terms of both the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) license.
Project can choose to either apply to be part of FSFE's Fiduciary Programme and make use of the legal network of the Freedom Task Force or adapt the FLA to consolidate copyright into their own organisation using their own legal experts.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.html
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
As it did in the past years, FSFE wants to thank all Fellows for their support, which is essential in making its work possible. For this purpose, several companies sponsored hardware and books of the 2007 Fellowship raffle, which will be held 1 April 2007. FSFE would like to thank all the companies that donated the gadgets and is happy to pass these gifts on to its supporters.
http://www.fsfe.org/raffle http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000170.html
If you wish to become an essential part of all the activities of FSFE and would also like to get your chance to win some of the many gadgets, join the Fellowship now:
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
Like the years before, the Free Software Foundation Europe was present with a booth at FOSDEM, one of the biggest Free Software conferences in Europe. This year, FSFE shared the booth with its Spanish associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation.
Shane Coughlan presented the Freedom Task Force in a lightning talk, and Georg Greve held the closing talk titled "Beyond GPLv3". An amazing total number of twenty members and volunteers of FSFE shared the work on the booth, answered questions, and talked to interested people.
You can find some more information, some pictures and links to the video recordings in the following blog entries:
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/life_after_fosdem http://fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/podcast_interviews_wit...
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
Ciarán O'Riordan represented FSFE at a computer science conference named SkyCon. He spoke about GPLv3, presenting the current state and the work ahead.
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
FSFE's first intern in FSFE's Zürich office and Freedom Task Force, Maria Luisa Carli, had to go back to Italy just after FOSDEM to finish her studies with an additional course. Marilu is planning to stay involved in FSFE's activities, though.
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/mlc981/marilu_s_blog
6. System administration murphy weeks
February was a dark month of system administration at FSFE, starting when one of its core servers going down due to a double hard disk crash in the system RAID-1 array, followed by an almost simultaneous network outage at the backup location, making all backups inaccessible.
This not only took down FSFE's main web site, but also that of our Latin American sister, which we are supporting with a virtual server. With some work we managed to get things back to operational state on another machine, and will hopefully be able to bring the crashed server back to life soon.
FSFE's infrastructure is mainly volunteer-organised, including the Fellowship portal, the further evolution of which is mainly held back by lack of administrator and developer time. If you wish to volunteer to help on these issues and could maybe even see yourself getting involved more deeply, please get in touch with either:
fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org system-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is a project to develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards. It will also try to fill this platform with some initial material. The project is funded by the European Commission for a period of two years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008.
During the first half year, the focus was on the analysis of existing material. Now, the implementation phase starts, both for the platform (developed at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai) and the conversion of existing material.
FSFE has set up a mailing list for coordination of FSFE's work:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self
There is also a general mailing list for the SELF project:
http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
So if the project sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the mailing lists, and contribute to the work!
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html