Minor report from the trenches of free software development, but a
project for Danish local authorities I've been heavily involved with the
last few years (since 2015, getting up to speed since 2017) made it to
the Joinup site:
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/au…
Basically, it's about something as bureaucratic as maintaining
authoritative organisation hierarchies, e.g. for local authorities
(which the tools was specifically made to support). Ideally, all
onboarding etc. of new staff could be done in this tool with
integrations in place to allow automatic access to other systems the
employees would need. Or, as it says in the article:
"OS2mo keeps tabs on the hierarchical links between units, manages lists
of employees, per unit, project and task. It provides a management
interface that shows for each unit, department, project team and person
who is responsible for what, who else is involved, and which IT systems
are being used. The information is easily exchanged with access
directories and other IT management systems, helping to create, change
and manage roles in an organisation, and manage user rights and access
rights. And then, OS2mo can also work as an organisation’s address book,
displaying contact details and presence information."
What is also interesting is that as small as this tool is, we also hope
it can serve as a door opener for other free software, which has *not*
otherwise been a priority for Danish local authorities. In order to run
this system, based as it is on PostgreSQL, Flask and Python (and some
frontend stuff) the municipalities need to provide a GNU/Linux server,
and for many of our customers this has been a first and a struggle with
their own IT departments.
I'm sorry if people find this announcement off-topic for this list, but
I can't help but be a bit excited to see a project I've been working on
for so long getting ready to go out there - and hopefully open more
doors for free software in the municipalities, as they see that it works
and is much cheaper than the proprietary systems they normally use for
these things.
Best regards,
Carsten
Hi everybody,
In the blog about fellowship elections being cancelled[1], the
fellowship has been likened to a corporate donor.
A similar comparison was made in the invitation to the extraordinary
general assembly.
On the transparency page[2], there is a link to donor information[3]
where FSFE identifies the significant corporate donors, especially those
who contribute more than 10% of the budget.
The fellowship appears to contribute[4] about a third of the budget,
more than any other single donor. That was almost EUR 190,000 in 2016
A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were
not identified publicly. Every corporate donor who contributes over 10%
is named publicly. Does anybody feel that the same transparency
principle should apply in cases such as bequests?
Corporate donors (whether they are publicly listed or private companies)
typically have to publish some information publicly, at a bare minimum,
we can see in which country they are domiciled and who their directors are.
I feel it is a good idea to publish more details about FSFE membership
and fellowship. In comparison, while at RMLL, I was at the session
about April where they announced that they have 4,000 members[5] and
clarified that these are all full members of the association with a
right to vote.
FSFE currently publishes[6] the names of all legal members (GA members),
there are 29. FSFE has not directly published statistics about the
fellowship though, although the page[7] about the last elections showed
there were 1,532 people eligible to vote.
There is a weekly report circulated in the team mailing list that gives
a membership breakdown by country. As fellowship representative, I feel
that the information in this report is quite important for the
fellowship at large. I also feel that it is important for other reasons:
- giving volunteers transparency, the same details that GA and team are
aware of
- being consistent with the availability of information about the
corporate donors (e.g. we can see where corporate donors are domiciled,
so it is important to know where the fellows are predominantly domiciled)
- as the "E" in FSFE is for Europe, I feel it is important to
demonstrate the extent to which FSFE is engaged in each European country
The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list
stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly. I notice that
the fellowship numbers had been increasing last year but in the last few
months it has been decreasing. Personally, I suspect that two factors
may be responsible:
- the renaming of "fellow" to "supporter", many of the email templates
and web pages only started using the new term in the last few months.
I personally feel this is a downgrade, as a fellow is by definition a
member of a fellowship while a supporter is a more external role. Other
people may have had the same feeling and quit.
- increasing awareness about the GA decision[8] in October to begin the
process of abolishing elections
There is also a report circulated each week about mailing list
subscriptions. I notice in this report that there is a strong
correlation between the number of fellows in each country and the number
of mailing list users in each country. The blog[1] about removing the
elections asserts that fellows are a "purely financial contributor" but
if they are active in the mailing list and volunteering, I feel that
statement does not adequately describe the fellowship and it is even
more critical to have details on the transparency page and to ensure the
GA meeting in October puts in place a new procedure for community
members to vote.
Regards,
Daniel
1. https://fsfe.org/news/2018/news-20180526-01.en.html
2. https://fsfe.org/about/transparency-commitment.en.html
3. https://fsfe.org/donate/thankgnus.en.html
4. https://fsfe.org/about/funds/2016.en.html
5. https://www.april.org/association#Chiffres_cles
6. https://fsfe.org/about/team.en.html
7. http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_29119d29f759bbf8
8. https://danielpocock.com/our-future-relationship-with-fsfe-2018
Digitaliseringsstyrelsen (Agency for Digitisation) in Denmark have
created an accessibility product called "acces for all" og "adgang for
alle", which is basically a screen reader. It's available for Windows
and MacOS, and for GNU/Linux-based operating systems it will work with
an extension for Chrome or Chromium:
https://adgangforalle.dk/
Basically, it's a Danish screen reader for people who are visually
impaired, including the blind.
It's available for download and anyone is free to use it, however it is
published under a very restrictive proprietary license.
Among the conditions in the license are
* Non-commercial use
* No copying or distribution of any kind, under threat of "serious civil
and penal legal consequences".
* No distribution within an organisation - an organisation such as e.g.
a library may *not* have the program on its servers in order to install
it on public-facing clients.
There's one very curious thing about this product: Often, organizations
have software made by private vendors, and the private vendors will
retain their copyright and their right to keep it proprietary. In this
case, it's the Agency for Digitisation *itself* that claims the
copyright and threatens with draconian consequences to anyone who dares
use their product e.g. on the job and not just in their spare time.
So it's Danish people's tax money preventing Danish people from using,
let alone sharing, studying and improving this software - created by
Danish tax money - and once again, it's us as taxpayers who are
financing the very agency that's withholding this software from the public.
I find it surreal and close to a textbook example of how *not* to do things.
Best regards,
Carsten
Hi all,
I'm sure many of you are aware that students at all levels of education
are forced to use nonfree software, and more recently, nonfree network
services in order to receive their education and fulfil the course
requirements (see https://www.gnu.org/education/ for prior writings on
this).
I'm having a bad day today because I'm currently a studying at a
programme that is an exception to the above, with a lot of focus on
using free software. But for some reason, a tutorial today was behind a
Google sign-in wall and the lecturer didn't want to export the tutorial
(which is just a jupyter notebook file) and upload it on the existing
learning management system for students to download and study.
This led me to imagine some possible ways in which the FSFE and/or other
organisations in the free software movement could try to work on this
topic:
1. A survey of students and instructors about their experiences and/or
policies in mandatory nonfree software and nonfree network services in
university classrooms (which can establish the magnitude of the problem,
and help identify ways to change this)
2. A campaign for instructors to pledge not to mandate the use of
nonfree software and network services and/or eliminate them from the
curriculum of their courses
Apologies for the hastily written email, but if anyone in the list is
interested in this topic, I'd love to here more.
Best,
Dem
--
Demetris Karayiannis
Linguistics, University of Eastern Finland
Homepage URL: dkarayiannis.eu
Hi!
Some of you may have noticed that in recent news, the ISOC has announced
the sale of the non-for-profit .org TLD registry to a private equity fund.
Many organizations and individuals find this highly questionable, among them
Creative Commons, EFF and Wikimedia, and even the FSF in the US.
I would like to suggest that the FSFE also joins this campaing / petition.
You can find more information at https://savedotorg.org/
Regards,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
============================================================================
"Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option."
(ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)
* Richard Stallman [2019-11-06 04:33 +0100]:
> I am against using computers to enter votes.
> See stallman.org/evoting.html.
Thank you for the pointer. I did not know about that page.
Best regards,
Matthias
--
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030 |(fsfe.org/support)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) Weblog k7r.eu/blog.html
Dear all,
As you already know the SFScon is hosting our Community meeting this
year. Along with the dedicated FSFE track on Saturday morning and the
afternoon community meeting, we will be having a booth with merchandise
during the entire course of the SFScon. That means starting Friday
morning and ending Saturday evening.
Would anyone of you be interested in joining us at the booth for any
time slot during the event? It would be great if people at the booth
would be able to take turns for breaks, and we are expecting a lot of
SFScon visitors to stop buy.
Please, let me know if and when would anyone of you coming would be
interested.
Thank you very much in advance,
Kind Regards,
Galia
--
Galia Mancheva- Project Manager
Free Software Foundation Europe | www.fsfe.org
+49-30-27595290 (office)
+32 488 070 135 (mobile)
fingerprint: 4195 1315 E14A A00A 0119 6F17 8040 8B16 CADD 6573
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030
Hi all
if it happens that you come to the Chaos Communication Congress this year you
could be interested in the FSFE's call for participation:
https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20191102-01.html
also if you know someone who is going there who might have interest, please
share the call. You find the text of the call within the link and hereafter in
copy:
# Call for sessions "about:freedom" during 36C3
In the context of the 36th Chaos Communication Congress happening from
December 27th to 30th in Leipzig, the FSFE is happy to host an assembly again
inside the cluster "about:freedom". We offer attention and a stage for
self-organised sessions by and for our community and friends, and this is our
call for participation.
For our sessions at the FSFE assembly, we are looking for inspiring talks,
hands-on workshops, community/developer/strategy meetings or any other public,
informative or collaborative activities. Topics can be anything that is about
or related to Free Software – from your private project to global community
projects. While we welcome submissions on technical topics, we also further
encourage non-technical talks that address philosophical, political,
economical, and/or other aspects regarding Free Software, particularly for
this year related to digital sustainability. As part of our cluster
about:freedom, we also look forward to sessions about related subjects that
have a clear connection to Free Software, in particular privacy, data
protection, encryption, the commons and internet policies.
For our friends, it is also possible to have informal meetings, announcements
or other activities at our assembly. In this case, get in touch and we will
see what we can do. If you are a musician and like to help forming our first
Free-Software-song sing-along big band, please also get in touch.
# Formalities
If you are interested in hosting a session, please apply before
** Monday, November 18, 18:00 UTC **
by sending an email to eal(a)fsfe.org with the subject “Session at 36C3” and use
the following template:
Title: name of your session
Description: description of your session
Type: talk / discussion / meeting / workshop …
Length: 30 / 60 / 90 / 120 min
Tags: put useful tags here
Link: (if there is a helpful link)
Expected number of participants: 20 or less / up to 50 / up to 100 /
beyond
About yourself: some words about you/your biography
Time limitations: exclude days or times you are not able to present
You will be informed latest on Tuesday, November 26, if your session is accepted.
# Good to know
* Be aware that an acceptance in our call does not guarantee or offer you a
ticket! Please check the CCC-announcements and proceed according to their
requirements for the tickets.
* If your session is accepted we will happily take care of its proper
organisation, advertising and everything else that needs to be done. You
are then welcome to simply come and host your session.
* For your inspiration see our sessions during 35C3, 34C3, 33C3 and 32C3.
Please, share this call with your friends and/or your favourite channels.
Best,
Erik
--
No one shall ever be forced to use non-free software
Erik Albers | Programme Manager, Communication | FSFE
OpenPGP Key-ID: 0x8639DC81 on keys.gnupg.net
Hi,
this is not an election, this is a farce. And I will not vote for anyone
in this farce. There is no election commitee I trust, so I doubt that
these are free and fair elections. The only thing you'll get here is
maybe a tendency, what the rebels, malcontents and mavericks of the FSFE
community want or don't want.
I support FSFE and not FSF - among other things - because of Stallman.
No question RMS did much good for the Free Software movement. After all,
he founded it and he is one of the reasons why Free Software even
exists. But I don't think he should stay any longer the figurehead of
the Free Software movement. Seems the longer he has any say, the longer
he will poison the well. He hurts his mission with statements about
sexual abuse, dehumanizing disabled people and denigrating women.
Btw: I have written 2 emails to lists.fsfellowship.eu. I think they
never get it to his mailling list and I can not find them in the
archive:
https://lists.fsfellowship.eu/pipermail/discussion/2019-May/thread.html
Looks like I am censored by Daniel Pocock.
Regards
Christian Imhorst
Am 13.05.2019 10:41 schrieb Ingrid Schwarz:
> Hello,
>
> Sorry everybody for not replying over the weekend, here are some of my
> policies
>
> Many Fellows use the fsfe.org email addresses. The Fellowship Council
> will demand a meeting with Richard Stallman and Matthias Kirschner to
> understand the conflict about the FSFE name and also represent the
> interests of Fellows who may be unaware of the conflict or
> inconvenienced. If FSF really objects to the name like in the leaked
> email then Fellows need to stop using it now, we shouldn't be trying
> to extort things from FSF. People can't accuse the last Fellowship
> rep of being entitled when FSFE is even more brazen using the name of
> another organization. But I would try to get a good deal for Fellows
> to keep their email addresses even if FSFE loses the name, this is why
> it is so important for Fellows to have a voice in the Fellowship
> Council now.
>
> Another group where I volunteer runs an annual ball. We sell tickets
> to all our friends, dress up and have a lot of fun. Most members are
> able to sell between 6 and 10 tickets, enough to fill a table.
> Fellowship groups can bid to host a Fellowship ball in their city each
> year.
>
> Before I write a lot more about my ideas, I would like to see the
> policies of other candidates.
>
> One candidate has proposed to delete people from the mailing list
> without consent. I don't feel comfortable about that and if we are
> both in the Fellowship Council, I would vote against it.
>
> Yours,
>
> Ingrid
>
>
>
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Wednesday, May 8, 2019 5:16 PM, Ingrid Schwarz
> <ingrid.schwarz(a)protonmail.ch> wrote:
>
>> Dear fellows,
>>
>> Conflict like this doesn't erupt spontaneously.
>>
>> Daniel isn't even a candidate but people are attacking him. They talk
>> about respecting the Code of conduct in one sentence and break it in
>> the next. He promised a smooth transition for the new council, I can't
>> see any way that he profits from helping run the election, why can't
>> people just say thank you and move on?
>>
>> Both Daniel and Armijn have described thuggish behavior from FSFE
>> bosses. Now we see it for ourselves.
>>
>> I came across this quote from Georg Greve on the fsfellowship site:
>>
>> "The Fellowship is an activity of FSFE, and indeed one of the primary
>> ways to get involved in the organisation. It is a place for community
>> action, collaboration, communication, fun, and recruitment that also
>> helps fund the other activities of FSFE, for example, the political
>> work."
>>
>> Moving the list to get around censorship appears to be a good example
>> of that 'community action', activism and political work.
>>
>> That is what political action looks like. It was effective. Now
>> everybody knows there is censorship in FSFE. We didn't know before and
>> now we do. It shouldn't be happening. If only more FSFE actions could
>> get their point across so clearly. That's activism, isn't that what we
>> signed up for? People can learn from somebody like Daniel.
>>
>> I can't see any harm that can come about by having a fellowship
>> council but I can see many benefits this council will have for free
>> software. So I hereby nominate.
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Ingrid
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discussion mailing list
> Discussion(a)lists.fsfellowship.eu
> https://lists.fsfellowship.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Hello,
got caught by surprise by the launch of the Fairphone 3.
It is clear that their success of pushing the state of the art in the area of
consumer mobile phones is based on Free Software (like Android).
The details are interesting, as there can always be something improved.
Does somebody have alreadys looked at the new model from the Free Software
side?
Having 10 out of 10 repairability score from iFixit is very good,
they are keeping their high standards from FP2.
https://www.fairphone.com/en/2019/09/17/ifixit-repairability/
My experiences:
* I know a few persons owning and running FP1 for years, very reliably,
almost 6 years. When the battery could not officially produced anymore
(understandable), the community found a replacement. Some still run the FP1.
Problem: the chipset choice made it hard to have a better software support
and Android 4.4 is dropping out of support by important apps.
* The two FP2 models I saw in vicinity had small hardware issues with touch
an rebooting, it was less a workable "mainstream" phone than others.
The modular approach was cool, though. I read that root and other "ROM"s
were possible.
* The FP3 announcement policy did not work for me. On of the persons with the
FP1 needed a replacement (because of software and battery life) and a used
phone with lineagesOSmicrog was bought, because the state of the FP3 was
unclear in the first half of this year.
I've heard that a sailfish OS port to FP3 is likely. :)
That is also a mobile phone operating system which (limited) success is based
on Free Software a lot.
What are your experiences?
What is the best argument you could make for something if you wanted to raise
the chance of this person buying an FP3?
Best Regards,
Bernhard
--
FSFE -- Founding Member Support our work for Free Software:
blogs.fsfe.org/bernhardhttps://fsfe.org/donate | contribute