## FSF Announces Support for WebM Project, Encourages Adoption
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, January 19, 2011 -- The Free
Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it is officially
supporting the WebM Project, and is encouraging Web site operators to
migrate any H.264-encoded video they have to WebM.
The full FSF announcement, "No double standards: supporting Google's
push for WebM" is available on its web site at
<http://www.fsf.org/news/supporting-webm>.
"Google has been working to bring together a broad coalition of
organizations to support WebM, which will go far to help it become the
video codec of choice with HTML5," explained Brett Smith, license
compliance engineer for the Free Software Foundation. "We want the
world to know that we also support WebM: with its developer-friendly
patent license and free software reference implementation, it's a good
choice to help ensure the Web fulfills its promise of providing a free
way for the world to communicate."
FSF executive director Peter Brown said, "We applaud Google's effort in
not only making WebM available for implementation by free software, but
also in promoting its reasons for deprecating the use of H.264. Now is
the time to act. Through joint community effort in support of WebM, we
can sustain the vision of the Web as free and unencumbered."
Google released the WebM video codec in May 2010. Unlike its competitor
H.264, developers who support WebM in their software do not have to
agree to a patent license that requires royalty payments, or limits how
developers license their own software.
### About the Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as
in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its
GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org
and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux.
Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at
<http://donate.fsf.org>. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
### Media Contacts
Brett Smith
License Compliance Engineer
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942 x18
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= FSFE Newsletter - January 2011 =
[Permanent URL: http://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201101.en.html ]
== Robots, Football, and Education ==
Their mission is to bring Free Software into schools and universities.
Their new task is to gather information about [1]their stakeholders,
and [2]create targeted leaflets. And I am sure the favourite colour of
the coordinators [3]Thomas Jensch and [4]Guido Arnold is [5]Fellowship
green. That's [6]our education team.
Can robots help with that? We think they can. Our education team had
[7]a first meeting to get trained in giving programming workshops
using freedroidz robots. We want to teach pupils how to program, show
them that it's good to share and co-operate, and explain Free Software
to their teachers, parents, and politicians.
And what about football? Regular readers might remember that Guido
Arnold is running a parallel tournament to the football championship
in Europe 2012 where the discipline is Free Software usage in
government. So every time there is a football match, Guido starts a
Free Software match between them, while a huge part is of course the
government's education policy. Read [8]Guido's blog to find out why
Russia is a hot candidate for the European champion, but why we need
more information on Eastern European countries.
== Public institutions - hares or snails? ==
Already, 203 public institutions have removed advertisements for
proprietary PDF readers from their websites. Particularly outstanding
were the responses from Croatia, Russia and Slovenia. In Croatia all
except one reported institution deleted the advertisement. Half of
those contacted in Russia and Slovenia fulfilled FSFE's request.
Amongst the public institutions are ministries, parliaments, law
enforcement agencies, local governments, and other administrations.
With [9]our PDFreaders campaign we will continue to follow-up with the
[10]reported institutions and you can still encourage friends [11]to
sign the corresponding petition.
== Something completely different ==
- You think your old C64 was slow? Working on the United Nations
level will change your mind. Karsten Gerloff wrote an article
about FSFE's UN work: [12]"WIPO CDIP/6: Moving the glacier".
- Open Standards in Europe: The European Commission published the
new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). We
at FSFE have been [13]working on this document for a long time.
Read [14]our press release and an [15]article by Karsten assessing
the new EIF.
- Current developments at Nokia, the transformative power of Free
Software, and the potential dangers posed by the use of Free
Software by large organisations. Those are the topics of the
[16]current Fellowship interview with Alexander Kahl, Fedora
packager, Lisp, JavaScript and Perl programmer, and active FSFE
volunteer.
- While Torsten Grote [17]gave a radio interview (German) about
risks of cloud computing and chances of distributed Free Software,
Björn Schiessle [18]writes about how he wants to install
distributed software at home.
== Get active: Help with Euro 2012 championship ==
Help us gathering information about government's Free Software usage.
This information helps us to evaluate the current situation and of
course it will decide who will be the European Free Software champion
in 2012. [19]Add the information on our website before March 25 and it
will influence the next matches, add information continuously and it
will help Free Software activists all over the world.
Regards,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
1. http://wiki.fsfe.org/Education#stakeholders
2. http://fsfe.org/about/printable/printable.en.html
3. http://blogs.fsfe.org/riepernet/
4. http://blogs.fsfe.org/guido
5. http://fellowship.fsfe.org/
6. http://fsfe.org/projects/education/education.en.html
7. http://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/2010/12/freedroidz-workshop-with-tarent/
8. http://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/category/euro2012/
9. http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/pdfreaders.en.html
10. http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/buglist.en.html
11. http://fsfe.org/campaigns/pdfreaders/petition.en.html
12. http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/?p=434
13. http://fsfe.org/projects/os/eifv2.en.html
14. http://fsfe.org/news/2010/news-20101216-01.en.html
15.
http://blogs.fsfe.org/gerloff/2010/12/17/assessing-the-new-european-interop…
16. http://blogs.fsfe.org/fellowship-interviews/?p=198
17. http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=698
18. http://blog.schiessle.org/2010/12/19/a-new-toy-arrived/
19. http://wiki.fsfe.org/Free_Software_usage_in_public_administration
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