FSFE Newsletter - July 2016EIF v. 3:
the EU hampers its own goal to promote better interoperability with harmful licensing terms
The FSFE provided the European Commission with our
input in regard to the ongoing revision of the European Interoperability
Framework (EIF). The EIF aims to promote enhanced interoperability in
the EU public sector, and is currently going through its third revision
since 2004. Whilst the draft version gives preference to Open Standards in delivering public services, it also
promotes harmful FRAND (so-called "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory")
licensing terms for standards. In practice, these are
highly anti-competitive and unfit
not only for Free Software but for the whole software sector in general.
In addition, the draft also ignores the proven relationship between
interoperability and Free Software: many national frameworks explicitly
require
their national services to be based on Free Software. We
asked the European
Commission to address these and other shortcomings and ensure interoperability
in an efficient way.
FSFE summit - Registration open and how to attend
From September 2nd to 4th we will be holding the first ever FSFE summit.
This is the
main event to bring together FSFE members and supporters from all over Europe.
In the last weeks our amazing team behind the FSFE summit invested their
online time, coffee breaks and even their daydreams to offer you an event
that is worthy of your visit and worthy of being the official celebration of
15 years of FSFE. The event is pan-European, organised for the community,
includes old stagers and newcomers, and takes place in the heart of Berlin.
Every day there is a new theme, built on talks about technology,
freedom and society. And last but not least, there will be social events in the evening
that give the opportunity to meet up, share ideas and plan new activities.
Registration for the first FSFE summit is now officially open. Additionally,
on the very same page you find valuable information about the questions
you might have about attendance. Better be quick as tickets will be "sold out"
soon!
Please be aware that our summit team is still working hard to shape an
inspiring and balanced community program for you and it will be finally
announced in the next weeks.
From the community
Given the latest news about implemented encryption in popular chat
applications, Hannes Hauswedell
discusses the important aspects of privacy in communication, and gives
some examples of current applications and ongoing projects that respect
privacy on different levels. Beyond encryption, says Hannes, our privacy is
in need of Free Software, device integrity and federated networks.
Framasoft has translated this blogpost into French.
Björn Schießle blogs about the
History
and Future of Cloud Federation where he explains the concept of server-to-server
sharing in Owncloud/Nextcloud and its development to a "federated cloud ID",
which looks similar to an email address. Like email, "federated cloud" refers
to a user on a specific server.
GA member Torsten Grote
writes
about the ongoing proprietarisation of Android and how this effectively
cripples other versions of Android and makes them increasingly useless.
Torsten also argues that even crippled Android versions are still an important
fundament for communities to increase the people's freedom.
Daniel Pocock writes about WebRTC
and communications projects as part of Google Summer of Code, under the
umbrella of the Debian Project. His overview includes WebRTC plugins
for popular CMS and web frameworks, truly peer-to-peer alternatives, and the GNU/Linux Desktop Telepathy framework.
Erik Albers writes how EU ministers recently missed the chance to
set Free Software as an integral part of their Open Access strategy and
why there
is no Open Science without the use of open standards and Free Software.
Björn Schießle writes about
Freedom for whom
where he shares his thoughts about the harm which the Contributor License Agreement
(CLA) causes to Free Software communities and how businesses and communities can
benefit from developing complete Free Software solutions.
What else have we done?
Erik Albers, head of the Team summit, blogged on several occasions
this month to share the ongoing process of organising the first ever
FSFE summit. He shared insights about the
PR/Logo,
the summit committee
and the
registration and the team behind it.
FSFE supported the creation of the
Software Heritage
initiative, an archive of Free Software code. It collects programs,
applications and snippets of code distributed under free licenses from a
wide variety of active and defunct sources with the aim of protecting code
from sinking into oblivion.
We once had the idea of creating national chapters of the
FSFE, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Matthias Kirschner now states that
the FSFE
Chapter Germany e.V. has been officially dissolved.
The FSFE sent its concerns to the Vice President of the Digital
Single Market Andrus Ansip, the Commissioners Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Günther
Oettinger, and Margrethe Vestager in regard to
harmful
FRAND licensing terms in the EU's standardisation plans.
We joined the initiative "transparent civil society" that is now
reflected in a new section in our About Page.
Our Transparency Commitment
lists all information necessary to be part of the initiative.
FSFE Austria represented the FSFE with a booth at Veganmania 2016 in Vienna (DE),
at Fair
Planet 2016 in Linz (DE) and at Linuxwochen
Linz 2016.
FSFE's vice president, Alessandro Rubini, helped to organise the
Italian Free Software Conference Confsl 2016 and
represented
FSFE in a dedicated session.
FSFE group Munich represented the FSFE with a
booth at the first Corso Leopold 2016 (DE).
The "FreieSoftwareOG" represented the FSFE with a booth in Offenburg (DE).
Take action!
Get
your ticket for the first FSFE summit from 2nd to 4th of September now!
Also, help
us to spread the word in your favorite mailing list, your blog, your
social media channels or share the news with your neighbours.
Good Free Software News
April updates us on their campaign regarding the French Digital Republic
Bill wherein the French
parliament has given priority to Free Software. Whilst general legal
framework in France is only taking baby steps in promotion of Free Software,
by the end of 2018, almost 70%
of all workstations in the French town of Fontaine will run GNU/Linux.
Bulgaria, on the other hand has currently become the leading example in
Free Software policies by adopting
a law that requires all software written for the government to be Free
Software and to be developed as such in a public repository. Andalusia
is keeping up with the trend and has announced that funding two
of the region's key Free Software projects, GECOS and Guadalinux will continue.
Colleges in Europe are
creating
courses to train students to help companies choose and use Free Software cloud services.
Thanks to all the volunteers,
Fellows and
corporate donors
who enable our work,
your editors Cellini, Polina and Erik, FSFE
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
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