FSFE Newsletter - July 2012
"Secure Boot": Who will control your next computer?
The FSFE's goal is to ensure that the owners of IT devices are always
in full
and sole control of them. This fundamental principle is recently being
challenged. For maintaining sustained growth in the development and use of
software, the broad availability of general purpose computers is crucial. This
month the FSFE published its
"Secure Boot" analysis.
We demand that before purchasing a device, buyers must be informed concisely
about the technical measures implemented in this device, as well as the
specific usage restrictions and their consequences for the owner.
Furthermore, we strongly recommend to exclusively purchase IT devices which
grant their owners full, sole and permanent control over security subsystems
(e. g. signature-based usage restrictions), in order to maintain the ability to
install arbitrary software and lastly to retain exclusive control over ones own
data.
European Court of Justice confirms: We are right!
We always said "They are willing to deal with everybody, but those who
compete with them." Meaning, proposing conditions against Free Software is an
abuse. Microsoft replied "change your business model to suit our licensing
scheme and you'll be served", or "Free what? Who the hell are you, what's
your turnover", or dismissals like this. Apart from annoying, they were
wrong. (Carlo Piana, who represented
the FSFE and the Samba Team)
This month the European Court of Justice has ordered Microsoft to finally
pay a record fine of 860 million euros for using its near-monopoly on the
desktop to keep rivals out of the workgroup server market.
Microsoft spent over 3.000.000.000 EUR to buy third parties out of this case. But for a decade, we
continued to participate in the case, to assert the rights of Free Software
developers to access interoperability information, especially for the Samba
Team. Samba is a Free Software to share files and printers in a network
competing with Microsoft's proprietary product.
This decision establishes
that we were right: Receiving the interoperability information was our right as
Free Software community, not a concession by Microsoft.
Spain won the Championship! What about Finland?
Interesting times in the European Free Software Championship. Spain
won the European Free Software Championship with 4:3 against Norway.
Thanks to referee Guido Arnold
we did
not receive any reports of fouls during the alternative games. Outside those
games the FSFE also works on fairness.
We have started an initiative to advance fair public procurements in
Finland, to lower the barrier for Free Software in the Finnish public sector.
The initiative concentrates on IT related procurement notices that require
brand instead of defining functionality required by the procurer. To date the
FSFE has skimmed over 300 procurement notices, and of those taken into closer
analysis, 14 have been found to clearly violate the Finnish procurement law.
These violating notices explicitly asked for tenders of specific brands of
software manufacturers or products and thus discriminate all other brands and
manufacturers, effectively stopping free competition.
The FSFE contacts the violating authorities and informs them about the
specific violation the notice contains, including a six item list of
recommendations to ensure proper competition.
Something completely different
The FSFE's former legal coordinator Shane Coughlan launched
OpenRelief. The project is aimed at developing
inexpensive—"disposable"—drone aircraft to assist relief teams in
detecting
people, changes in terrain, smoke, radiation, and other conditions in places
that may be difficult or dangerous for on-the-ground exploration.
After
meeting other Fellows at Linuxtag in Berlin, Heiki Ojasild decided to
hold a PDFreaders sprint at Akademy in
Tallinn, Estonia. On July 4th
everyone is invited to follow our PDF Readers Sprint
Guide stopping public bodies from restricting the users' freedom and
unfairly distorting the competition in favour of certain proprietary software
makers.
The FSFE's president Karsten
Gerloff welcomes the Basque Country's move to introduce a policy that
software developed with public funds will be released as Free Software by
default.
The draft for the UK Communications Bill outlines how civil servants are
intent on surveilling the internet communications of British citizens. Sam Tuke wrote about how to use
Free Software to protect your privacy online, regardless of the measures that
the Coalition may impose upon you or your telecoms providers.
UPDATE: The European Parliament rejected
ACTA. (04/07/2012)
The FSFE has been asking
activists across Europe to protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement (ACTA). Our aim is that the European Parliament finally
rejects this controversial treaty, which would greatly harm citizens'
rights. The Parliament will hold a plenary vote on ACTA on 4th of July.
A bit sarcastic: some people are wondering
who was violating the GNU GPL with StuxNet.
And in the upcoming month, the FSFE will be present at the RMLL (Libre Software Meeting) in Geneva,
and as you can see on our event page
Richard Stallman is giving talks in the Czech Republic, Germany, and
Spain.
A selection from the Fellowship blog
aggregation:
Fellowship representative
Hugo Roy commented on Facebook's updates of the terms of service
(that is the document most people never read, but everyone agrees to when
they sign up to services online).
Mirko Böhm is
analysing why Nokia is laying off 10.000 employees, including 700 core Qt
developers?
A Federal US Judge says APIs are not copyrightable. Read more in Carlo Piana's article, and learn why
copyright in software is not the same copyright as the one granted to
literary works.
Hannes Hauswedell wrote a triology (part
0 part
1, and part
2) about a versatile, open and future-proof audio setup.
And finally, read why it might somtimes be complicated to
really "try turning it off and on again"?.
Get Active: Whom should we ask next?
Every time your editor reads a Fellowship interview
he feels proud to work for the FSFE with all those amazing people. Again
this month
when Bjarni Runar
Einarsson was interviewed about PageKite, an application which
allows the publication of websites stored on personal computers. PageKite can be combined with other Free
Software to realise decentralisation.
Please help Chris Woolfrey and Sam
Tuke by suggesting other Fellows
for an interview. You can also participate in our editors team to help
interviewing people and editing other publications. And finally, if you know
interesting people in the Free Software community who are not yet Fellows (it
is hard to believe, but your editor heard rumours they still exist), convince
them to become a Fellow, so we can make new interesting interviews for
you.
Thanks to all the Fellows and
donors who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
--
Free Software Foundation Europe
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