My random thoughts about politics, society and technology (tag: fsfe)

New challenges for Free Software business models

Different Free Software business models evolved over the past and the most successful are threaten these days by the raise of IaaS providers. What does this mean for the future of economical success of Free Software? Read more...

Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other?

Fellowship meeting Stuttgart

It’s time for the next Fellowship meeting in Stuttgart. It will take place at Thursday, 2 April at 19:00! We are going to meet in the “Unithekle”, Allmandring 17 , 70596 Stuttgart. Short term changes are announced in the wiki.

This time we want to talk about Free Software in education. I think this is an interesting and important topic. We live in the digital age. Therefore pupils should learn how to use and develop information technology in an social and sustainable way and all pupils should have equal opportunities. So if you know pupils, teachers or parents which are interested in Free Software, just take them with you to the Fellowship meeting.

“Frühjahrsfestival zum Datenschutz” at Stuttgart

Freie Software alleine garantiert keine sichere Software, aber sie ist eine notwendige Grundvoraussetzung um überhaupt sichere und vertrauenswürdige Software zu schaffen. Read more...

Happy Birthday FSFE!

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) celebrates his 2³ birthday! For 8 years now, the FSFE works for basic rights and freedom in the digital age, a world in which our life increasingly depends on software.

In this eight years FSFE achieved a lot, from the local area to Europe and even up to the United Nations. It ranges from highly visible activities like the Document Freedom Day and the recently launched pdfreaders.org to a lot of behind-the-scenes activities like the work at the United Nations, promoting Free Software interests at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), contributed to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), taken part in discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), taught project managers of the World Bank about Free Software and many more.

PDFreaders.org launched

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced their latest initiative: PDFreaders.org. The initiative started in the Fellowship and is coordinated by the Fellows Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters. The Fellowship increases FSFE’s financial independence, FSFE’s political weight, FSFE’s workforce and is the source of many great projects, activites and campaigns. Read more about the Fellowship.

Many websites with PDF documents have a link to a proprietary PDF reader from one specific company. This initiative tries to change this and offers buttons to link to pdfreaders.org which leads people to a list of free as in freedom and vendor neutral PDF readers.

An awesome event is over: KDE 4.2 Release Party and Fellowship Meeting at Stuttgart

At Friday, 30.Jan.09 we had a joint event between KDE and the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and it was simply awesome! Beside a lot of KDE and FSFE people we had a lot of visitors and at the end we were about 40 people! All interested in KDE 4.2 and Free Software.

At the beginning Frederik started with an introduction and showed all the new and cool things in KDE 4.2. After that i gave a talk about the work of FSFE, especially in 2008, explained the role of the Fellowship for FSFE and highlighted some cool activities from our Fellows. My slides can be found here (German). I think i could attract some people and would be really happy to see some new faces at our next Fellowship meeting (probably somewhen in March). If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to our mailing list for South Germany.

Back from Chemnitz

At this weekend Rainer and I were in Chemnitz at the [“Chemnitzer Linux Tage” (CLT)][1]. It was the first time that FSFE had a booth at this event and for me it was the first time going to a fair especially to work at the FSFE booth.

The first day was really hard for us. Because of the late decision to go to Chemnitz we had a bad place for our booth and many visitors hadn’t seen us. But luckily we had found a much better place for the second day. This is a picture of our booth at the second day, it was in the central corridor in front of the entrance:

a lot of impressions and news

I’m back from the SFSCon and the first international FSFE Fellowship Meeting in Bolzano (Italy). For me i can say that it was a great event and it gaves me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people from the Free Software Foundation Europe and around Free Software in general.

The Fellowship Meeting was also the place were a new project of the FSFE was launched, the Freedom Task Force (FTF). A project which works in partnership with gpl-violations.org and offers licensing education, fiduciary services and licence enforcement. For more information follow the link above.