Hi all,
there are also news entries on the main page, but I also wanted to let
you know that some noteworthy reading is available by mail.
My recommendation for the weekend would be to take a look at our
statement about the Microsoft licensing policies as a result of the
European Commission antitrust case, which are specifically designed to
exclude Free Software. [1]
Also, there is news from the United Nations Working Group on Internet
Governance, which is part of the United Nations World Summit on the
Information Society setup. On February 1st, 20 issue papers were
published, asking for comments until noon today.
In a concerted action, La Fundacion Via Libre, our Argeninian
associate organisation, and FSFE managed to supply comments on two of
the most important and also worst ones. [2]
Have a nice weekend,
Georg
[1] http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2005q1/000092.html
[2] http://fsfeurope.org/projects/wsis/index.en.html
--
Georg C. F. Greve <greve(a)fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org)
GNU Business Network (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
X11R6.8.2 Officially Released by X.Org
___________________________
X.Org Foundation Releases Update
For X Window System Release X11R6.8.0
________________________________________
Brookline Massachusetts, February 9, 2005 - The X.Org Foundation today
announced the fourth release of the X Window System since the formation of
the Foundation in January of 2004.
The new X.Org release, called X Window System Version 11, Release 6.8.2
(X11R6.8.2) builds on the work of X.org X11R6.8.0 and X11R6.8.1 released in
2004. X11R6.8.2 combines the latest developments from many people and
companies working with the X Window System and an open X.Org Foundation
Release Team. All Official X.Org Releases are available for download from
ftp://www.x.org/pub and at mirror-sites world-wide.
About this Release:
The X11R6.8.2 release is intended to be a stable bug fix release
("Maintenance update") for the X11R6.8.0 and X11R6.8.1 X11 releases of
the Xorg Foundation, containing bug fixes, security updates and a
small set of new features, which include the following:
- ATI R100 video driver
- ATI "radeon" video driver
- ATI Rage128 video driver
- CYGWIN infrastructure update
- DMX Library updates
- Intel i810 video driver
- libXpm security update (CAN-2004-0914)
- Mesa (OpenGL) update to release 6.2
- Fixes to the pseudocolor emulation layer (currently only used
by the Neomagic driver.)
- "nv" (Nvidia) video driver
- Postscript print driver
- Xprint infrastructure update
Please refer to the X11R6.8.2 Release Notes at http://www.x.org for
further details. The full list of changes between the initial X11R6.8.0 and
this release can be found in the Changelog.
About participation and membership in X.Org:
Membership in the X.Org foundation is free and open to all participants.
Active participants in the further development of the X Window System are
invited to visit: http://www.x.org/XOrg_Foundation_Membership.html to
complete a membership application. Participation in the Foundation's
Sponsor Group is also available to those who wish to financially
support the activities of the X.Org Foundation. Current Sponsors
include Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Hummingbird, IBM, Starnet
Communications, WRQ, and Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS).
About the X.Org Foundation:
X.Org Foundation L.L.C. is a Delaware company organized to operate as
a scientific charity under IRS code 501(c)(3), chartered to develop
and execute effective strategies that provide worldwide stewardship of
the X Window System technology and standards. The group is currently
managed by its Board of Directors that includes: Stuart Anderson (Free
Standards Group), Egbert Eich (Novell), Jim Gettys (HP), Stuart
Kreitman (SUN Microsystems), Kevin Martin (Red Hat), Jim McQuillan
(Linux Terminal Server Project), Keith Packard (HP), and Leon Shiman
(Shiman Associates). The website for the X.Org Foundation can be
found at http://www.x.org/.
About Community Participation:
This release was built on X11R6.8.0 by the direct contributions of 66
developers, with the support of X.Org's Release Wranglers. Names of all
contributors can be found in the Release Notes.
About The X Window System:
The X Window System provides the only common networked windowing
environment bridging the heterogeneous platforms in today's
computing. The X Window System is one of the most successful
open-source, collaborative technologies developed to date and is the
standard graphical window system for the Linux® and UNIX® operating
systems. The inherent independence of the X Window System from the
operating system, the network and the hardware, as well as its
successful interoperability, have made it widely available and
deployed with more than 30 million users worldwide. All major hardware
vendors support the X Window System and many third parties provide
technologies for integrating X Window System applications into the
networked computer or personal computer environments including
Microsoft Windows®, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS® X. Further, thousands of
software developers provide X Window System applications, and with the
continued growth of Linux and the emergence of Mac OS X, the number of
users is growing rapidly.
Notes to Editors:
(1) Distributed Multihead X Project: http://dmx.sourceforge.net/
(2) The Mesa 3D Graphics Library: http://www.mesa3d.org
(3) The Xprint Project: http://xprint.mozdev.org/
---------------------
UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in
the US and other countries. LINUX is a registered trademark of Linus
Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft
Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS is a
registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the
U.S. and other countries. All other company names are trademarks of
the registered owners.
For questions, please contact: Leon Shiman, Secretary, X.Org Foundation, at:
Shiman Associates Inc
(00)1.617.277.0087
leon(a)shiman.com
The European Commission holds press briefings around noon CET
each day. You can watch them on Europe by Satellite via 13 east,
or listen to mp3 audio online at http://europa.eu.int/comm/ebs/
Yesterday, there was a question on software patents (transcript
below). In both question and answer, it mentions that the
Luxembourg presidency will propose it as an A point (= no
discussion) yet again next week. Should we do anything?
I'm a bit confused. Next AgFish looks like 28 Feb (it's
another terrible web site). Is it being shoved elsewhere?
http://ue.eu.int/cms3_applications/applications/meetings/getworkingProgram.…
4m50s in on ftp://video:videofiles@158.169.50.2/press/audiovisual/mp3/37968.mp3
Simon: You may have answered this last week, but on the software
patents proposal, you're probably aware that the Luxembourg
presidency is going to put the bullet of agreement back on
the table as an A point next week. Does the commission have a
view on this, given the very strong message that he received
from the parliament to re-present a proposal, the fact that the
council seems prepared to persue the original track rather than
restarting the process as the parliament asked?
Well, Commissioner Charlie McCreevy was with the legal affairs
committee of the European Parliament last Wednesday, just
before the vote take place in the committee where the request
was made that this be put forward to the first reading. Well,
the opinion of the commission at this stage, as expressed by
the Commissioner then as well, is that we keep our options open,
and that I can repeat that again, that we keep our options open
because as you just said it will be an A point on the [indistinct]
council and the official request from the parliament has
not yet reached the commission because that has to be decided
by the conference of presidents of the European Parliament.
So for us, it's now a moment where we keep the options open and
see how we can move best forwards when we have more information
on what both the other institutions are going to do with this,
in this respect.
--
MJR/slef
1. FSFE in Dublin
2. FSFE at World Social Forum (WSF)
3. HP donates two servers
4. Continued tour through Italy
5. Activities against software patents
1. FSFE in Dublin
At the University of Dublin, Georg Greve gave a talk about the
challenges of Free Software in a digital world and also introduced
the work of the FSFE.
As always, he also used the opportunity to intensify contacts with
the local Free Software community and discussed possibilities for
integrating people from Ireland more closely into the FSFE network.
2. FSFE at World Social Forum (WSF)
In cooperation with the Free Software Project Brasil [1], FSFEs
president Georg Greve participated in a series of activities and
events [2] around Free Software at the World Social Forum (WSF) in
Porto Alegre, Brazil -- among them the official release of the 2005
Free Software Forum. [3]
The Free Software, free knowledge and free arts events at the WSF had
strong support from the Brazilian Cultural Ministry. Gilberto Gil,
minister of Culture, participated in some of them personally, along
with other known figures, such as Lawrence Lessig and John Perry Barlow.
During the WSF, many activists also made their first contact with Free
Software using one of the about 1000 machines in the estudio livre and
other access points.
[1] http://www.softwarelivre.org/
[2] http://www.softwarelivre.org/news/3543
[3] http://fisl.softwarelivre.org
3. HP donates two servers
Hewlett-Packard Germany donated two Compaq N2400 servers (Dual CPU,
Pentium III 1GHz with 1GB RAM each). The machines have replaced the
quite outdated web- and mailserver machines and are running core
services of the FSFE. The FSFE would like to thank HP for their
support.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/help/hardware.en.html
4. Continued tour through Italy
After the successful public events in December, the Italian FSFE team
has continued their tour through Italy and took part in the "week of
digital freedom", which was organized by the Linux Club Italia in Rome.
Alessandro Rubini talked about "Embedded Free Software", and Stefano
Maffulli held a speech about "Free Software Foundation Europe:
activities and plans for the future". T-shirts of FSFE are available
at the Linux Club.
http://www.italy.fsfeurope.org/it/events/2004/tour/tour.it.html
5. Activities against software patents
The decision of the EU council to introduce software patents in Europe
is still not finally approved, and the political resistance against
that decision has become stronger than ever. The FSFE and its
associate organisations, most of all the FFII, are still cooperating
in their efforts to prevent that threat to innovation.
http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat/
You can find a list of all FSF Europe newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
Trolltech announced that they want to dual license Qt 4 for Windows
and thus release it as Free Software under GNU GPL for the first time.
Their press release can confuse people as software under GNU GPL
can of course be used commercially like all Free Software.
http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/00000192.html
Trolltech to Extend Dual Licensing to Qt for Windows
Qt cross-platform development software will be available under the
open source GPL license for open source development and a commercial
license for commercial development
Qt for Windows will be available under both a commercial
license and the open source GPL license starting with the next major
production release of Qt, version 4.0, which is expected in the
second quarter of 2005.
Hi all,
FYI there is IMHO an interesting question on gnu-misc-discuss(a)gnu.org
--
Matthias Kirschner, Intern <mk(a)office.fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe (http://www.fsfeurope.org)
Greetings.
I have a colleague who wishes to release a program under a free software
licence. However, he and/or our company wishes to reserve the right to use
and relicense any third-party contributions under another (possibly
non-free) licence. I therefore suggested using the following licence:
Gnomovision is released under the GNU General Public License, with the
additional proviso that for any modifications to the source code which you
publish, you agree to grant Vice, Inc. a perpetual, world-wide,
royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, display,
perform, sublicence, and distribute said modifications (or portions
thereof) either on an unmodified basis, or with other modifications, as
source code or binary code or as part of a larger work.
However, I believe that such a licence would break compatibility with the
GPL (and probably most other free software licences). Am I correct? If so,
I suppose this might discourage people from contributing to the project,
and would also preclude the inclusion of or linking to GPL-covered
third-party code.
If anyone has comments on this licence or ideas for modifications or for
some alternative licence which could be used, please let me know and I'll
pass them along to my colleague.
Regards,
Tristan
--
_
_V.-o Tristan Miller [en,(fr,de,ia)] >< Space is limited
/ |`-' -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= <> In a haiku, so it's hard
(7_\\ http://www.nothingisreal.com/ >< To finish what you
Hello.
Ruby, found at www.ruby-lang.org is a oo language written under the Ruby
licence found at: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/LICENSE.txt
It clearly states that:
"You can redistribute it and/or modify it under either the terms of the
GPL (see COPYING.txt file), or the conditions below: "
So just to be SURE.. I can use anything that is licensed under the Ruby
LICENSE as if it was licensed under GPL?
Thijs
(The Netherlands)