FSFE - 2009 New Year's Resolution

Hi all,

perhaps you have not seen FSFE's New Year's Resolution [1] yet. Here are
some things that you can do to help spread this message:

- Add the button on your website. E.g. with the following html snippet: 

    <a href="http://fsfeurope.org/2009">
    <img src="http://fsfeurope.org/news/2009/nyr/nyr2009_button.png" 
    border="0" alt="2009 New Year's Resolution" /></a>

- Add a signature in your e-mail or blog. E.g. 
    - "Support Free Software in 2009 (http://fsfeurope.org/2009)"
    - "2009 - Time to get active (http://fsfeurope.org/2009)

- Print out the pdf version [2] and distribute it in your
  company/university/Free Software user group.

- Submit the news to community sites or vote for them. I know it was
  already submitted to Slashdot [3] and FSdaily [4]. 

Thanks,
Matthias

  1. http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2009/nyr.en.html
  2. http://www.fsfeurope.org/news/2009/nyr-2009.pdf
  3. http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=2929789
  4. http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/FSFE_announces_New_Years_Resolution_Fellowship_campaign
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Deputy  German Coordinator, Fellowship Coordinator

DFEY-NW :: January 18th :: Digital Freedom in Education and Youth - North West UK

(Please forward this to anybody or any lists you think might be interested)

DFEY-NW (Digital Freedom in Education & Youth - North West) is a group 
focusing on young people and issues of freedom in the digital world, 
based in the Northwest of England at the moment.

=== In Brief ===

WHERE: Meet near the strange phonemast-like sculpture thing outside 
Manchester OXFORD ROAD Station.

VENUE: BBC Headquarters, Oxford Road, Manchester

WHEN: Sunday 18th January, 12pm -> ~4pm

YOU *MUST* SIGN UP: http://dfey-nw.eventwax.com/dfey-january-meeting

CONTACT: Email - team at dfey dot freedomdreams dot net

-- 

MAILING LIST: http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dfey-nw-discuss

WEBSITE: http://dfey.freedomdreams.co.uk

--

-- 

Notes from the last meeting: 
http://dfey.freedomdreams.co.uk/wiki/Meetings/October/Notes

The Enrico Zini Interview Vote

Please vote now for the newest instalment of your favourite interview
series:

http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/FSFE_Fellowship_Interview_with_Enrico_Zini
http://digg.com/linux_unix/FSFE_Fellowship_Interview_with_Enrico_Zini
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=3117403

Feel free to also inform your respective fsfe/fsfeurope country mailing
lists.

The interview itself is available here:
http://fellowship.fsfe.org/interviews/fellowship_interview_with_enrico_zini

all the best,
/Stian
--

-- 
Stian Rødven Eide                 stian <at> fsfeurope.org                     
Free Software Foundation Europe   http://fsfeurope.org
Join the Fellowship               http://fsfe.org

_______________________________________________
Discussion mailing list
Discussion <at> fsfeurope.org
https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion

Web browser interoperability: FSFE welcomes EC's decision and offers support

Perhaps you have not seen it yet. We published a press release about
EC's decision: "Web browser interoperability: FSFE welcomes EC's
decision and offers support" [1] (also already available in Ελληνικά and
Italiano):

    On the 16th of January the European Commission DG Competition
    reported that it had issued a statement of objections regarding
    Microsoft's tying of Internet Explorer (IE) to the Windows Operating
    System product family. This action builds on a complaint originally
    submitted by Opera, a European company involved in web browser
    development.

    Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the European Commission's
    decision and offers its support in the coming anti-trust
    investigation. As stated previously in a letter to the European
    Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, anti-competitive behaviour is
    unacceptable, whether it occurs as 'tying' products with dominant
    market segments, or in circumventing standards and fair access.

    "Web browsers are becoming a critical platform for home and business
    computing," says Shane Coughlan, legal coordinator at FSFE. "The
    market previously failed to prevent unfair distortion of the desktop
    environment and we cannot allow such practices to be repeated."

    "It is important that no business in Europe is allowed to institute
    any policy of embracing, extending and extinguishing competition
    either through manipulation of interoperability information or
    through abuse of a dominant position by unfair tying and bundling of
    products," says Georg Greve, FSFE President. "Microsoft is a company
    that has previously been convicted of market distortion in the Work

Re: On the EUPL

Dear Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz,

Of course I have heard about you and your personal involvement in the
European Public License. So please forgive me if my comments upon an
earlier draft of the EUPL have offended you. I hope you understood that
my comment was the result of direct solicitation.

From a quick glance at EUPL version 1.1 it now seems that the license
has been greatly improved since that first draft I saw. Congratulations!

Although FSFE's legal department would require a bit more time for
thorough analysis, the license now looks like a Free Software Copyleft
license that is expressedly compatible to the old version of the GNU
General Public License (GPL). For future improvement it would be good if
compatibility to the current version of the GNU GPL were also added.

Otherwise version 1.1 seems to have solved the issue that existed with
paragraph 13 of version 1.0, and while license proliferation [1] is
always a concern, the Compatibility clause in paragraph 5 seems to have
addressed it sufficiently through explicit compatibility and the ability
to relicense.

So from a first look it seems to me that the EUPL is now fit for its
intended use as a license catering to the specific political needs of
European public administration and it will help to foster growth of the
European Free Software ecosystem.

I'm sure you'll understand that this is a tentative analysis, pending a
more thorough one by the legal departments of our sister organisation
and FSFE itself, but maybe this quick response is already helpful.

Re: On the EUPL

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 07:58:16PM +0100, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> 
> From a quick glance at EUPL version 1.1 it now seems that the license
> has been greatly improved since that first draft I saw. Congratulations!
> 
> Although FSFE's legal department would require a bit more time for
> thorough analysis, the license now looks like a Free Software Copyleft
> license that is expressedly compatible to the old version of the GNU
> General Public License (GPL). For future improvement it would be good if
> compatibility to the current version of the GNU GPL were also added.
>

Indeed, from a quick read it looks much better than I remeber version 1.0. 

I'm not sure about the last two clauses with choice of law and jurisdiction, 
but the rest seems fine. At first I was also confused by attaching law
and jurisdiction to the Licensor, because I thought there could be many licensors,
but it was my mistake. Licensor is defined as the person passing the work, 
not the original authors or contributors, so there's reasonably only one 
for each possible dispute or litigation. It's a bit unnatural to me, though,
the fact that, if I understand it right, when I publish a program under 
EUPL 1.1 from Catalonia, and then a user in Bavaria downloads my program from 
a Welsh website and breaches the license, it is possibly me who should sue, 
since I'm the copyright holder, but I should sue the Bavarian user in Welsh courts, 
since the Licensor at stake would be the website owner offering my program.
Is that so ? 

--

-- 
xdrudis@...
Signa per fer Collserola parc natural com cal

Re: On the EUPL

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:49:42 +0100
Xavi Drudis Ferran <xdrudis@...> wrote: 

 xdf> [...]  Is that so ?

Your question is an interesting one and needs someone with more legal
knowledge than myself to look at it, so I've forwarded it to the FTF,
our legal department. [1]

Regards,
Georg

[1] http://fsfeurope.org/ftf

--

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve@...>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
President                                      +41 43 500 03 66 ext 400

Still seeking a New Year's Resolution?  Visit http://fsfeurope.org/2009

On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 01:49:42 +0100
Xavi Drudis Ferran <xdrudis@...> wrote: 

 xdf> [...]  Is that so ?

Your question is an interesting one and needs someone with more legal
knowledge than myself to look at it, so I've forwarded it to the FTF,
our legal department. [1]