Only one day left to influence the EURO 2012 qualification games

(Also available on http://blogs.fsfe.org/mk/?p=642)

Do you like football? Well you do not have to, to participate at the
EURO 2012.  Guido Arnold announced a parallel tournament for the
European football championship 2012. The criteria: Free Software usage
in the public administration. The rules are relatively simple, you can
read them in Guido's blog [1]. 

Tomorrow evening there will be 22 matches [2].  Enough time for you to
influence the them.

Either you create a wiki account [3] and add information about Free
Software usage in the public administration to the overview page [4], or
you write a short message with the hashtag #euro4fs to Guido (in CC).
One possible source is OSOR's news archive [5].

As it is common in football since some time to bribe the referee, this
is also possible: Just transfer the money to FSFE's bank account (other
payment methods [6])

  Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
  IBAN: DE69 3602 0030 0003 0047 32
  National-Bank Essen, Steinstraße 13, 40212 Dusseldorf, Germany
  SWIFT/BIC: NBAG DE3E

with the subject "donation for Free Software European championship
[Country name]" and announce your bribery via microblog with the above
mentioned hashtag ;)

Regards,

Shell access

[Attempt 2 at avoiding moderator approval]

Hey all,

When I was going through uni, I was greatly disappointed that the uni
only had Windows boxes. I didn't really want to bring my own computer
to and from uni everyday. There was a simple solution, SSH into a
decent host. But, try as I might all the paid shell providers seemed
quite seedy, and the free ones (like metawire) had a few issues -
mostly due to the kind of people they attracted.

I never did find a decent shell provider, but I never forgot the
frustration involved in trying. I ended up with a Linode VPS.

Now I've had an idea I've been toying with for a while, and that is to
provide a host fellows can SSH into. I hope this will mean we won't
hit the problems of typical shell hosts, as the user base hopefully is
a reasonable and honorable group.

The rules would be simple, but hopefully easy enough to follow:
- No non-free content/software*.
- Don't get me in trouble.
- Don't interfere with the services provided to other people.

The requirements for joining would also be simple:
- FSFE email address.
- OpenPGP key.
- Agreement to the rules.

I have a budget of about $50 per month for this, which would get two

Re: Shell access

Roscoe <rm@...> writes:
> Sound like a good idea? Crap idea? Suggestions?

Not a bad idea.

Just a random thought: If spamming or abusing the internet connection
of the VPS is a problem, how about not providing outbound access at
all? People could easily tunnel their outgoing traffic back to their.
local system. For example

ssh -t -R 3218:proxy.at.some.edu:3128 your-vps.somewhere.example.com \
 sh -c 'http_proxy=http://localhost:3218/ elinks'

would start the elinks browser on the VPS but route its traffic over
ssh back to the client machine.

(You probably want to use network namespaces of linux to make sure
that each user can only access their own port forwardings..)

Re: Shell access

Roscoe wrote:
> Now I've had an idea I've been toying with for a while, and that is to
> provide a host fellows can SSH into. I hope this will mean we won't
> hit the problems of typical shell hosts, as the user base hopefully is
> a reasonable and honorable group. [...]
> Of course no one may care, but I was thinking if I got 10 people keen
> I'd go for it :)
> 
> Sound like a good idea? Crap idea? Suggestions?

Fine idea.  There are a few shell hosting co-ops around.  Maybe you
could copy the decision-making structure and basic rules from one of
them?

Good luck!
--

-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire through http://www.software.coop/products/techsupp/

The Privacy Implications of Geotagging

Article on the threats of geo-tagging to privacy and user safety "Cybercasing 
the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging":

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pubs/publication.pl?ID=002932

Article on the threats of geo-tagging to privacy and user safety "Cybercasing 
the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging":

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/pubs/publication.pl?ID=002932

OpenERP Webclient proprietär

Hi there,

Bernhard pointed out on fsfe-de@... that the license from
http://www.openerp.com/download/stable/source/openerp-web-5.0.12.tar.gz
looks like it is non-free. Here a quick and dirty translation of the
message (the party from OpenERP were in English before):

  The OpenERP web client is distributed under the "OpenERP Public License".
  It's based on Mozilla Public License (MPL) Version 1.1 with following
  restrictions:

  -   All names, links and logos of Open ERP must be kept as in original
    distribution without any changes in all software screens, especially in
    start-up page and the software header, even if the application source code
    has been changed or updated or code has been added.

You cannot use it for any purpose, e.g. make a version for very small
screens (you are not allowed to remove the logos).

The company 2007-TODAY Tiny ERP Pvt Ltd is also experimenting:

  If you need commercial licence to remove this kind of restriction please
  contact us.

This would mean that they think that you are not allowed to use their
software commercially, but that you have to buy another license.

But in their FAQ they write:

.  Why add branding restrictions on MPL?

Norwegian Free Software Center Opposes Government Pro FOSS Policy

This is old news, but I wonder if people were aware of it at the time?:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-
Blog/Norwegian-Free-Software-Center-Opposes-Government-Pro-FOSS-Policy

This is old news, but I wonder if people were aware of it at the time?:

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-
Blog/Norwegian-Free-Software-Center-Opposes-Government-Pro-FOSS-Policy

Re: Norwegian Free Software Center Opposes Government Pro FOSS Policy

* Also sprach Sam Tuke <samtuke@...>:
> This is old news, but I wonder if people were aware of it at the time?:
> 
> http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-
> Blog/Norwegian-Free-Software-Center-Opposes-Government-Pro-FOSS-Policy

I have translated this article into English:

---
Preference Policy for Free Software?  No Thank You!

Will there come a preference policy for free software?  The Minister for
Renewal has been challenged about this earlier.  Her answer is that she has a
pragmatic relationship with free software.  Great - the Norwegian Competence
Centre for Free Software does too.

In other words, we do not need a preference policy towards free software.
Software is something we need not or should not be for or against.  It is not a
political matter one needs to consider, like [economical support for people
deciding to be home with their children instead of sending them to
kindergardens] or oil drilling.  A preferential policy will mainly be about
whether public enterprises should be required to choose free software over
closed software.

Software development points in a direction of open solutions, shared
development environments and healthy competition.  Free software has a central
place in all ICT (Information and communications technologies) developments,
and is already a competitive direction for development.  Qualitative and
quantitative analysis indicates increased use and a multitude of solutions.
Free software holds a significant position in Norwegian and global IT industry,

Re: Norwegian Free Software Center Opposes Government Pro FOSS Policy

Andreas Tolf Tolfsen translated:

> If
> one were to put constraints on the choice of software to individual
projects,
> this could also lead to the individual public entity could not choose
the best
> solution.  Increased use of free software is important for the
development of
> ICT in public sector, but it must be based on the premise that free 
software is
> the best solution in competition to closed software....

This is a very strange point of view for an entity which calls itself a
"Free Software Center". They don't seem to care about the philosophical
advantages to free software, nor to the fact that entities which build on
proprietary software compromise their infrastructure and places it in the
hands of private vendors, but seems to think it's all about technical
advantage.

Maybe they should change their name to the "Norwegian Open Source Center".

Re: OpenERP Webclient proprietär

Il giorno mer, 08/09/2010 alle 09.50 +0200, Matthias Kirschner ha
scritto:

> The company 2007-TODAY Tiny ERP Pvt Ltd is also experimenting:
> 
>   If you need commercial licence to remove this kind of restriction please
>   contact us.
> 
> This would mean that they think that you are not allowed to use their
> software commercially, but that you have to buy another license.

I don't agree with your interpretation :)

I think this sentence is straightforward: you need a commercial license
just if you want to remove links and logos. That is: you can use it
commercially without buying a commercial license... but you must keep
their branding stuff.

This is, for example, a typical strategy of many free (as in beer) photo
galleries for websites.

> 
> But in their FAQ they write:
> 
> .  Why add branding restrictions on MPL?
> 
>     These restrictions are only to maintain our trademark and branding. 
>     It will not affect in any case product copying, 
>     improvements, deploying, etc.
>