Fellowship News

Dear Fellows, the Fellowship blog service blogs.fsfe.org will be in read-only mode for system maintenance on Sunday 23 October at 21.00 CET for about 1 hour.

Thanks for your patience!

Numerosi gli interventi, dalle 10 alle 19, a conclusione quello di Stallman: "Tutti sono benvenuti nel mondo del software libero!", entusiasmante… tanto che mi sono unita alla fellowship.

Tra gli altri interventi, tutti di notevole interesse, voglio segnalare la campagna lanciata da Renzo Davoli:

Liberalizzazione nel campo del Software per Personal Computer

The event will be held Thursday June 7th from 9.30am until 1.30pm at the Aula Magna della Caserma Sani, located in Via Principe Amedeo, 184. It is reachable walking from Termini Rail Station or by the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele metro station.
Admission is free for the whole event. Audio/Video streaming will be also available. More info here, in Italian. Full press release here, in English.

Free Software Foundation Europe has received many comments, both from Fellows and members of the community, confused by the fact that some of the items being raffled weren't real prizes but devices that needed liberation. Since the confusion couldn't be cleared easily, FSFE we have decided to take the following items out of the raffle

• 1 Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech
• 3 Developer Discount codes for Nokia N800 Internet Tablets, by Nokia
• 2 Free Software based routers KWGR614, by NETGEAR

and will pass them to developers for full liberation at a later stage.

FSFE sees its Fellows as a part of itself, as people with very strong committment to freedom and strong ethics, who would always do the right thing. We always assume honesty and strong principles.

This perception has been part of the Fellowship idea from the start and is reflected in many details, like the — from a minimum — freely chosen Fellowship contribution, which has never been checked.

Unfortunately this perception has clouded our vision to the potential negative interpretation of putting these items into the raffle. We were sure that if we pass these along to Fellows they would do the
right thing and work on liberating the devices with more freedom as the logical consequence. But it seems that some people got the impression we were simply distributing them as prizes. This would
amount to distribution of the devices with proprietary software for usage, not liberation, and would be against our principles.

We have to admit that the communication allowed that conclusion, which at the time seemed so remote to people in FSFE that we failed to consider this interpretation enough. For this we apologise.

We obviously will not continue what we now see as a mistake, and therefore we have decided to take these items out of the fellowship raffle. They will be replaced by 15 copies of "Free Software, Free
Society" and the remaining items in the raffle will be raffled as planned.

After the raffle is over, we will have a dedicated call to liberate these devices where people can apply for them and they will be given the devices under certain conditions. In setting this up we will pay
attention to the Fellows who have already applied to be allowed to work on liberating the devices.

We hope that you will understand and support this decision, and that you will continue to be a part of our work in the future.
With best regards,
Georg Greve
FSFE, President

"Software written using public funds should have it's source code published under a distribution licence that has been declared Free by the Free Software Foundation, rather than remaining a closed secret.

This would allow for more of the public to benefit from the development of the software since the code would be available for anyone to use and improve. Furthermore, compatibility with other Free licences (such as the GPL) would promote rapid development and reduced costs through the reuse of existing code.

An open development model would also allow the public to be more informed of the progress and quality of these projects, which so frequently seem to end up severely over budget."

Jonas and Georg have migrated all services of fsfe.org to a new server, more powerful than the previous one. Hopefully we won't have to experience the downtimes anymore. If you notice any problem please report to fellowship-hackers at fsfeurope dot org.

Some of you will notice that there is a new feature in the portal: a WYSIWYG editor for news, events and also articles. eZ Systems has released its Online Editor under the GNU GPL and we have soon implemented it on fsfe.org. We hope you appreciate the effort.

There are also two new items on the navigation menu: a FAQ to start addressing the concerns of Fellows regarding the portal, and a page for the external supporters of the Fellowship, companies and groups that have contributed to the Fellowship in significant forms.