Hi,
reading the "FSFE Newsletter - October 2016" [1]
We're still not over how cool it was to see so many from our community join the FSFE Summit in September. It was a good experience and we're keen to repeat it. [...]
I miss any mentioning of an (internal) discussion in the aftermath of a very questionable talk[2] advertising proprietary software. The speaker of that talk is head of a company selling non-free software but trying to get associated with Free Software. In the F&Q after the talk the speaker was asked about this (35'50'' into the video) and confirmed that their software is and will not be published under a Free Software license. He also said that he did not think cloud services should at all require Free Software, be it GPL or BSD.
I am quite surprised to see such a talk at an FSFE conference. In particular because the talk was not described as giving a counterpoint to Free Software. It was a straight ad talk and that should have been known to the program committee: For example, the FSFE president was recently guest at one of their dinner events and before that he had asked me about my opinion on that company (I once gave a keynote at one of their events).
A newsletter should not be silent about topics which can at least be called controversial and have been called in as an agenda topic for tomorrow's FSFE general assembly.
Shalom-Salam,
Werner
[1] https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201610.en.html [2] https://conf.qtcon.org/en/qtcon/public/events/581