1. Fellowship of FSFE announced 2. Comments on WSIS/WGIG papers 3. Wilhelm Tux hits the apple 4. Software patents: the battle continues... 5. Microsoft tries to bypass European Court decision
1. Fellowship of FSFE announced
After months of preparation and much hard work, the FSFE presented the Fellowship program at this year's FOSDEM event in Brussels. For a yearly fee of 120 Euro (60 Euro for students) you can become a fellow of FSFE and support its work politically, financially and through your activities.
The Fellowship is a community with its own web portal where fellows can post blogs, share experiences in foras, and keep up to date with the latest news. Every fellow gets an email address in the fsfe.org domain to publicly display his or her support for Free Software.
As a practical feature to strengthen their privacy and security, all Fellows also receive a unique, personalised OpenPGP-compliant SmartCard programmed and handled by Werner Koch, author of GnuPG and Head of Office of the FSFE. The card contains keys for electronic signatures, for encryption, and for state of the art secure key-based authentication.
During the past months, we worked on the planning and designs of the Fellowship -- all designs were done pro-bono by the companies futurebrand, who did the imagery and SmartCard, and artundweise.de, who did the web page design.
Special thanks go to the global Plone community that helped us quickly and competently with getting the site up within a little more than a week -- an amazing feat. Special thanks go to Russ Ferriday for help with the layout, as well as Riccardo Lemmi from reflab.it and Holger Lehmann from catworkx.de, who helped us with the not-entirely-trivial registration form.
The Fellowship will be very important to give Free Software and those who actively work for digital freedom the necessary weight and resources. So if you have not yet signed up, please do so at
2. Comments on WSIS/WGIG papers
On 1st February 2005, the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) published a set of 20 issue papers concerning "Internet Governance." Together with its associate organisation La Fundación Vía Libre, the Free Software Foundation Europe managed to comment on the paper on "Cyber security, cybercrime", which, among other things, asked to outlaw the art of finding elegant solutions to non-obvious problems ("hacking") and the paper on "Intellectual Property Rights", which for instance asked to "balance human rights with the interests of rights-holders."
For more information, see
http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/wsis/
3. Wilhelm Tux hits the apple
The Swiss associate organisation of the FSFE, Wilhelm Tux, shows considerable activity: In Berne, Switzerland, an event called "LOTS" (Let's Open The Source) was organized and Georg Greve was invited to hold the keynote about Free Software. Also, several members of Wilhelm Tux joined the FSFE booth at FOSDEM.
4. Software patents: the battle continues...
Politicians from all countries and of all parties show an ever increasing awareness of the potential damage an introduction of software patents in Europe would do to economy. While the Commission persists in the current directive draft and the Council still hasn't finally approved its position, the European Parliament officially demanded a restart of the whole process to get out of the current deadlock situation.
5. Microsoft tries to bypass European Court decision
As reported in earlier newsletters, Microsoft has been asked to publish technical information about the interfaces to their Windows Operating System to enable competitors (most notably the Samba Free Software project) to reach Windows interoperability. However, the licensing terms that Microsoft now has published for these documents exclude Free Software in general and the GNU General Public License in particular. The FSFE will, together with the Samba team, continue to fight for just and reasonable conditions.
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html