If you were wondering when the newsletter would come back, stop
wondering - it's back! We apologise for the delays in delivering the
newsletter over the past few months and assure you that our monthly
newsletter will now resume the task of updating you regularly about
FSFE activities.
This month's newsletter has been specially extended to include items
for the first quarter of 2009. Starting from the next month onwards,
the traditional format of the newsletter will be back: one month, one
newsletter!
I am pleased to take over the role of newsletter editor that
previously belonged to Reinhard, Shane and Ciaran. I'll do my best to
keep up their good work and to improve upon it. If you have any
suggestions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me at: poderi <AT>
fsfeurope <DOT> org
Giacomo Poderi
1. FSFE at the international workshop on "Regulation of the Internet", 31 March
2. FSFE statements at 13th Session of the Standing Committee on the Law of
Patents, 23-27 March
3. DFD 2009, global day for document liberation, 25 March
4. FSFE at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, 14-15 March
5. Happy Birthday to FSFE!
6. FSFE brings Free Software to CeBIT 2009, 03-08 March
7. Fellowship vote for GA seats - Call for nominations: the candidates
8. Regular Fellowship meetings and special KDE release parties
9. Meetings of the special interest groups
10. FSFE engages in the EU browser case
11. FSFE presence at FOSDEM 2009, 07-08 February
12. The Fellowship interviews: Colin Turner and Enrico Zini
13. The Fellowship launches the Free PDF Readers campaign
14. FTF publishes "Building legal infrastructure for your Free Software project"
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
15. European Licensing and Legal Workshop for Free Software, 23-24 April
16. FSCONS Fellowship meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, 15 April
17. Voting procedures for the Fellowship seat at the General Assembly
1. FSFE at the international workshop on "Regulation of the Internet", 31 March
Free Software Foundation Europe's (FSFE) President Georg Greve represented
the organisation by participating in the workshop entitled "Technical
Regulation of the Internet: From Standardisation to Behavorial and Societal
Norms", which was held in Paris on the 31st March. The main topic of the
workshop was the relevance of standardisation processes in the context of
'open innovations'. In relation to this event, Georg wrote an article
entitled "Considerations on Innovation and Competition Policy".
http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=309
2. FSFE statements at 13th Session of the Standing Committee on the Law of
Patents, 23-27 March
Georg Greve participated in the 13th Session of the Standing Committee
on the Law of Patents (SCP) of the World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO), in Geneva. On behalf of FSFE, he made important
statements on the issues of patents and standardisation, patents and
future works, exceptions and limitations of patents. If you want to
know what is going on at WIPO, Georg wrote a roundup on the SCP/13
with many links and pointers to background information at
http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=302
3. DFD 2009, global day for document liberation, 25 March
Thanks to the hard work made by Ivan Jelic and the support provided by
FSFE, once again it has been possible to celebrate the global day for
document liberation. Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a collaborative and
volunteer driven effort to educate the public about the importance of Free
Document Formats and Open Standards in general. 273 teams of which 82 were
new ones and 72 countries with at least one team are the numbers of the
DFD 2009. The DFD team is currently gathering and organising all the
information about this year's activities. These will be published on the
DFD web pages. If you have material about local document liberation
activities, please send an e-mail to: contact AT documentfreedom.orghttp://documentfreedom.org/
4. FSFE at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, 14-15 March
Isabel Drost, Dirk Zemisch and Rainer Kersten managed a FSFE booth at
the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage on the 14th and 15th March. The event was a
big success, with about 2600 visitors in all. The FSFE booth received
visits from many interesting visitors, and the team enjoyed the
friendly atmosphere at the event. FSFE will surely be at Chemnitzer
Linux-Tage 2010 to repeat the experience. If you are interested in
helping us to manage this or any of our other booths, please contact
us. It's hard work, but lots of fun!
http://fsfeurope.org/contribute/booth/booth.html
5. Happy Birthday to FSFE!
On the 11th March, FSFE celebrated its eighth birthday. Established in
2001, the Foundation has constantly contributed to the diffusion of
Free Software principles in Europe. For the past eight years, its work
has ranged from the educational to the political, and from the
technical to the social. A rich history of achievements that FSFE
intends to keep up, while addressing new challenges for the benefit of
Free Software. To mark the occasion, we published a special interview
with Georg Greve, founder and current president of FSFE. The interview
traces the origins of the Foundation and its main achievements.
Enjoy the reading and once again...Happy Birthday to FSFE!
http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=27http://fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090311-01.html
6. FSFE brings Free Software to CeBIT 2009, 03-08 March
For the first time, FSFE participated at this year's CeBIT expo in
Hanover, the largest computer expo in the world. FSFE was there with a
booth and three talks held by Bernhard Reiter, Shane Coughlan and
Georg Greve. The volunteers at the booth were kept busy during the
entire expo, helping to spread Free Software principles and explain
them to the public. Bernhard, German chapter coordinator, conducted a
speech entitled "Free Software, the sustainable alternative". Shane,
Freedom Task Force (FTF) coordinator, discussed "the strategic
implementation of Free Software in business". Georg challenged the
public not to be afraid of turning to Free Software and explained
clearly why there is little to fear, but a lot to gain in making the
chance, with a speech entitled "To dare more freedom!".
Georg: http://streaming.linux-magazin.de:8080/cos09/di02.ogg
Shane: http://streaming.linux-magazin.de:8080/cos09/do08.ogg
7. Fellowship vote for GA seats - Call for nominations: the candidates
In March, the candidacy period was open for Fellows to candidate for
the election to their first reserved seat at FSFE General Assembly
(GA). We are happy to announce that the Fellows running for the
election are: Torsten Grote, Jan-Hendrik Peters, Michel Roche and
Bjoern Schiessle. Soon they will present themselves to the Fellowship
so that other Fellows will have the chance to form their opinion about
the vote. There will be a two months period for the voting process, which
will conclude in time for the next GA in Miraflores de la Sierra, Spain,
19-21 June.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090301-01.html
8. Regular Fellowship meetings and special KDE release parties
In the first quarter of 2009, the Fellowship proved to be as lively as
ever. Regular meetings happened in Germany, Austria and Sweden. The
Fellows met in Augsburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Gothenburg and Vienna.
They talked about Free Software, participation to events, planned future
activities, and most importantly, they got the chance to get to know
each other better. Additionally, at the end of January, special
Fellowship events were held in Berlin, Stuttgart, Vienna and Zurich to
celebrate the release of KDE 4.2, in cooperation with the KDE community.
We are happy to see the community growing and being active and we would
welcome similar meetings taking place all around Europe.
http://techbase.kde.org/Events/KDE42ReleaseParties#Europe
Zürich KDE 4.2 launch event speeches: http://sss2009.blip.tv/#1830788
9. Meetings of the special interest groups
On the 24th February and the 24th March, two FSFE Freedom Task Force
legal special interest groups meetings took place. The first meeting
was at the law firm Kemp Little's offices in London, while the second
one was hosted in Frankfurt, at the offices of attorneys WilmerHale.
Both meetings discussed linking and were reserved to the members of
the European Legal Network: a professional network of legal experts
facilitated by the FTF.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/network.html
10. FSFE engages in the EU browser case
FSFE declared its support the European Commission's antitrust
investigation against Microsoft and has requested to be admitted as an
interested third party. In January, the European Commission DG
Competition issued a statement of objections regarding Microsoft's
tying of Internet Explorer (IE) to the Windows Operating System
product family. This action built on a complaint originally submitted
by Opera. FSFE provided valuable support to the Commission in the
previous European Commission antitrust case from 2001 to 2007. FSFE
hopes to join the new investigation and will provide all the required
expertise to the Commission.
http://fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090227-01.html
11. FSFE presence at FOSDEM 2009, 07-08 February
As in past years, FSFE participated in the Free and Open Source
Development European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. The event promotes
the widespread use of Free Software, provides Free Software developers
and communities with a place to meet, to get in touch with other
projects, and to promote the development and the benefits of Free
Software solutions. We set up a booth where we informed people about
our recent activities, the Fellowship of the FSFE and Free Software in
general. We also sold our merchandise articles. The booth included a
special FTF desk to discuss licensing issues with FOSDEM participants.
http://www.fosdem.org/2009/
12. The Fellowship interviews: Colin Turner and Enrico Zini
For the "Smallest unit of freedom" interviews series, we present you
Colin Turner and Enrico Zini. Colin works as a scientist and teacher
at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has been
advocating Free Software in schools and universities for many
years. Enrico is a prominent Italian Debian developer. He has been
involved in many different projects relating to Free Software and he
is deeply concerned about social issues. Both are long time Fellows.
Colin Turner http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=17
Enrico Zini http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=7
13. The Fellowship launches the Free PDF Readers campaign
The Fellowship of FSFE is proud to announce its latest initiative:
pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about the Portable
Document Format (PDF) with links to Free Software PDF readers for all
major operating systems. Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters
worked hard during the past months. Thanks to all the feedback
received from Fellows and interested people, they managed to improve
the beta version of the website and to make it ready for a great
launch in February. Help us spread the word!
http://pdfreaders.org/http://fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090202-01.html
14. FTF publishes "Building legal infrastructure for your Free Software project"
In January, FTF released an important guide to help Free Software
projects to understand the relevance of having a formal legal
infrastructure and how to set it up. Written as a quick and easy
guide, the document is spreading fast and receiving good feedback from
the Free Software community.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/building-legal-infrastructure.html
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
15. European Licensing and Legal Workshop for Free Software, 23-24 April
FSFE announced the second European Licensing and Legal Workshop which
will take place at the Hotel Okura on the 23rd and the 24th of April
2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
http://fsfeurope.org/news/2009/news-20090323-01.html
16. FSCONS Fellowship meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, 15 April
On the 15th of April, Fellows and other interested parties are invited
to attend an open planning meeting and get-together to discuss FSCONS
2009. The meeting starts at 19:00 in Delirium Cafe, Kronhusgatan 2B.
17. Voting procedures for the Fellowship seat at the General Assembly
Information on the voting procedures and about the candidates' profile
are under processing while I'm writing this newsletter. They will
appear shortly, stay tuned!
http://fsfeurope.org/news/news.html
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.html
You can find how to support FSFE on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/contribute/contribute.html
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