1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
6. System administration murphy weeks
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
1. Fiduicary License Agreement released under GFDL/CC-by-sa
Making Free Software projects legally maintainable is increasingly
important. This includes maintaining the ability to relicence, ensure
licence compliance, and to ensure clean copyright.
FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) is a copyright assignment
carefully crafted to help Free Software projects consolidate their
copyright to a single organisation or person.
http://fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html
The FLA was originally developed and released in 2002 with a grant to
allow people use the agreement for their own purposes. FSFE has now
released a new revision of the FLA under the terms of both the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) license.
Project can choose to either apply to be part of FSFE's Fiduciary
Programme and make use of the legal network of the Freedom Task
Force or adapt the FLA to consolidate copyright into their own
organisation using their own legal experts.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000168.html
2. FSFE announces big raffle among all Fellows
As it did in the past years, FSFE wants to thank all Fellows for their
support, which is essential in making its work possible. For this
purpose, several companies sponsored hardware and books of the 2007
Fellowship raffle, which will be held 1 April 2007. FSFE would like to
thank all the companies that donated the gadgets and is happy to pass
these gifts on to its supporters.
http://www.fsfe.org/rafflehttp://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2007q1/000170.html
If you wish to become an essential part of all the activities of FSFE
and would also like to get your chance to win some of the many
gadgets, join the Fellowship now:
http://www.fsfe.org/join
3. FSFE at FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium)
Like the years before, the Free Software Foundation Europe was present
with a booth at FOSDEM, one of the biggest Free Software conferences
in Europe. This year, FSFE shared the booth with its Spanish
associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation.
Shane Coughlan presented the Freedom Task Force in a lightning talk,
and Georg Greve held the closing talk titled "Beyond GPLv3". An
amazing total number of twenty members and volunteers of FSFE shared
the work on the booth, answered questions, and talked to interested
people.
You can find some more information, some pictures and links to the
video recordings in the following blog entries:
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/life_after_fosdemhttp://fsfe.org/en/fellows/shane/communicating_freely/podcast_interviews_wi…
4. Ciarán O'Riordan at SkyCon in Limerick (Ireland)
Ciarán O'Riordan represented FSFE at a computer science conference
named SkyCon. He spoke about GPLv3, presenting the current state and
the work ahead.
5. End of internship of Maria Luisa Carli
FSFE's first intern in FSFE's Zürich office and Freedom Task Force,
Maria Luisa Carli, had to go back to Italy just after FOSDEM to finish
her studies with an additional course. Marilu is planning to stay
involved in FSFE's activities, though.
http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/mlc981/marilu_s_blog
6. System administration murphy weeks
February was a dark month of system administration at FSFE, starting
when one of its core servers going down due to a double hard disk crash
in the system RAID-1 array, followed by an almost simultaneous network
outage at the backup location, making all backups inaccessible.
This not only took down FSFE's main web site, but also that of our
Latin American sister, which we are supporting with a virtual
server. With some work we managed to get things back to operational
state on another machine, and will hopefully be able to bring the
crashed server back to life soon.
FSFE's infrastructure is mainly volunteer-organised, including the
Fellowship portal, the further evolution of which is mainly held back
by lack of administrator and developer time. If you wish to volunteer
to help on these issues and could maybe even see yourself getting
involved more deeply, please get in touch with either:
fellowship-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
system-hackers (at) fsfeurope.org
7. Get Active: Join the SELF project!
SELF (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) is a project to
develop a platform for the collaborative sharing and creation of free
educational materials on Free Software and Open Standards. It will
also try to fill this platform with some initial material. The
project is funded by the European Commission for a period of two
years, from summer 2006 to summer 2008.
http://www.selfproject.eu/
During the first half year, the focus was on the analysis of existing
material. Now, the implementation phase starts, both for the platform
(developed at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai)
and the conversion of existing material.
FSFE has set up a mailing list for coordination of FSFE's work:
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/self
There is also a general mailing list for the SELF project:
http://mail.selfproject.eu/mailman/listinfo/discussion
So if the project sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the
mailing lists, and contribute to the work!
You can find a list of all FSFE newsletters on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/newsletter.en.html
Boston, Massachusetts, USA---Wednesday, March 7th 2007---The Free
Software Foundation announced details for its annual associate member
and activist meeting to be held at MIT, Cambridge, MA, on Saturday,
March 24th, 2007.
Keynote speakers Richard Stallman (FSF president) and Eben Moglen (FSF
director and legal counsel) will each address the "Year of the Upgrade"
theme, looking at what issues will demand the free software movement's
attention after the new version of the GNU General Public License
(GPLv3) is released.
This year's meeting will have the ceremony for the FSF's annual free
software awards, where winners of the "Award for the Advancement of Free
Software" and the "Award for Projects of Social Benefit" will be
announced and recognized. Previous winners have included community
luminaries like Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt and Alan Cox and the
community project Wikipedia.
The meeting will also feature practical discussion among FSF members and
its board of directors about ways to increase free software adoption and
strengthen the free software movement. Staff members will discuss
current FSF campaigns and projects, eliciting feedback and input to
shape plans for the coming year.
Peter Brown, FSF executive director said, "The FSF has had a busy year
revising the GNU General Public License and campaigning successfully
against Digital Restrictions Management. We see 2007 as a year of
opportunity to significantly increase free software adoption, and our
annual meeting will help us develop our priorities for the year ahead".
Now in its fifth year, this annual gathering has become a sounding board
for activities of the Foundation, and a place to develop ideas with the
free software community. As part of an interactive "Members Forum"
session, Benjamin "Mako" Hill, activist and researcher at MIT's Media
Lab, will speak about the impact of free software philosophy on
copyright and culture in a presentation called "Defining Free Culture".
The full schedule of speakers and details for registration and attendees
is published at http://www.fsf.org/associate/meetings/2007.
About the Free Software Foundation:
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting
computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute
computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as
in freedom) software - particularly the GNU operating system and its
GNU/Linux variants - and free documentation for free software. The FSF
also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of
freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at www.fsf.org,
is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to
support their work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Their
headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
Media Contact: John Sullivan Free Software Foundation <pr(a)gnu.org>
Phone: +1-617-542-5942
_______________________________________________
FSF And GNU Press mailing list <info-press(a)gnu.org>
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-press
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FSF aims for partnership with hardware manufacturers
Boston, MA---March 1, 2007---The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today
released a paper entitled, "The road to hardware free from
restrictions", detailing ways major hardware manufacturers with power
in the market can work with the free software community to establish a
"mutually beneficial relationship."
The paper, available at,
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/how_hardware_vendors_can_help.html,
recommends manufacturers take action in five areas: supporting free
software drivers, ending the "Microsoft Tax", removing proprietary
BIOS locks, supporting a free BIOS, and rejecting Digital Restrictions
Management.
Peter Brown, FSF executive director, said, "With the growing
utilization of free software and the rejection of Microsoft's Vista,
large vendors like HP, Dell, Lenovo and Sun have the opportunity and
responsibility to acknowledge the market for hardware suitable for
free software users---hardware that meets ethical requirements for
user freedom, privacy and security. We hope that this paper will focus
attention on what needs to get done in the coming months."
A draft of the paper was first sent on January 10, 2007 to HP and Sun
Microsystems for their comment. Since then, several related
developments have demonstrated that the ideas in "The road to hardware
free from restrictions" are widely held within the technology
community.
Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman's open offer to all manufacturers
for free Linux kernel driver development has generated a sizable
response. Dell's recent solicitation of customer feedback was met
primarily with proposals to make all Dell machines optionally
available without Microsoft Windows, replacing it with either no
operating system or with a choice of GNU/Linux distributions.
Suggestions for Dell to support LinuxBIOS and to build their laptops
with hardware fully supported by free software drivers were also
popular choices.
In the paper, the Free Software Foundation expresses its eagerness to
build on this momentum by assisting hardware vendors interested in
making the recommended changes, and it encourages vendors to take a
fresh look at this largely unexplored opportunity.
----
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software---particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants---and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their web site,
located at www.fsf.org, is an important source of information about
GNU/Linux. Donations to support their work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA.
Press Contact: For more information about this announcement or to
schedule an interview, please contact Peter Brown or John Sullivan at
+1-617-542-5942 or pr(a)fsf.org.
####
_______________________________________________
FSF And GNU Press mailing list <info-press(a)gnu.org>
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-press