1. Heading towards the GPLv3 2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy 3. AFFS General Meeting 4. Improving the infrastructure
1. Heading towards the GPLv3
The world wide network of Free Software Foundations is currently preparing the next step in the evolution of the GNU General Public License, the most used license in the Free Software world. While there is no doubt that the current version (GPLv2) holds in court and is applicable all over the world, the GPLv3 will address aspects that were not as pressing or did not exist at the time the GPLv2 was written, like programs that are used over the internet. Other issues likely to be of interest are software patents, compatibility with other copyleft licenses, DRM and TCP.
The Free Software Foundation Europe is determined to put as much time and energy into this project as it needs to make the GPLv3 as powerful and successful as the GPLv2 is.
The FSFE has set up a mailing list for public discussion of GPLv3, to which you are invited to subscribe at
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/gplv3
2. Karsten Gerloff at the ATTAC Germany summer academy
Karsten Gerloff was asked to give a speech about the current developments within the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the A2K (Access To Knowledge) Treaty at ATTAC Germany's summer academy in Goettingen. His talk was part of a seminar on intellectual monopoly rights.
Karsten was also invited to attend a meeting of the ATTAC "Knowledge Commons" working group.
3. AFFS General Meeting
On 13 August, FSFE's UK based associate organisation AFFS held its General Meeting. Ciaran O'Riordan held a talk about what has been achieved with regards to software patentability, and how the road ahead looks like.
4. Infrastructure
As August was a quite unspectacular and not many events were scheduled this month, the FSFE team worked on what could be considered "house keeping" -- improving the infrastructure so we will be ready for the next work-intensive months.
A new asterisk server allowing Voice Over IP connections within the team and the reorganisation of mail distribution lists and internal data repositories should help improving communication, which is always a challenge when people are spread all over Europe.
The Fellowship was another target of improvements: while the current system works well and stable, the time has come for the first round of improvements. A major point is the upcoming migration of the portal site www.fsfe.org from Plone to ez Publish.
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html