Inside FSFE, we talk a lot about our legal department, the FTF. I was in the Zurich office a while ago with the FTF’s coordinator, Shane Coughlan, and took the opportunity to gather some info for anyone interested. The FTF works in five main areas: Building a European legal network Producing documentation GPL enforcement FLA Read more »
Recent fellowship meetings (Autumn 2008) In the last two months, I’ve been to Fellowship meetings in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Ireland. These usually happen whenever I have another reason to go to a city. We organise a Fellowship meeting to make the trip it extra worthwhile. One purpose is to get to know Read more »
FSFE’s role in the antitrust case was to ensure that free software developers would be able to use any interoperability information that Microsoft would be forced to publish. After 5 years of work, the last court case was won last year. There were always doubts about whether Microsoft could really be pinned down, but from Read more »
The OSM board have just sent notice that they’ve set the end of 2008 as their deadline to produce the new licence for OSM. The current draft being discussed, which you might like to take a look at, is that of April 2008: open_database_licence_2008-04-10_draft.pdf And FWIW, the board meeting minutes have been put online too. Read more »
The European Patent Convention generally defines whether ideas in a domain are patentable or not. The pertinent part is Article 52 which says: "Patentable inventions (1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application. (2) Read more »
The French government is likely to lobby the other EU member states to support disconnecting people from the Internet without a court case. The French government first tried to convince the European Parliament (EP), but that backfired and the EP adopted a text (amendments 138, 166) stating that a judicial process should always be necessary Read more »
Rockbox 3.0 is out! – I’ve installed it and it’s working well. The default theme is nice, and radio seems to work on my iRiver H10. On the downloads page you can see what pocket music players are supported. GIMP 2.6 is out too! The user-interface has been improved so that the toolboxes shouldn’t get Read more »
We’ve started a series of monthly Fellowship interviews, as many probably noticed (thanks to LWN, FSDaily, GNUvox, Linux.com, and Groklaw). There’s an RSS feed and a permanent URL: http://www.fsfe.org/en/layout/set/rss/content/view/full/21882.rss http://fellowship.fsfe.org/interviews Any Fellow of FSFE can be nominated to be interviewed. In fact, we need nominations: we don’t know every Fellow, so to find good candidates, Read more »