There’s a great workshop coming up at the European Parliament, on “Legal aspects of Free Software”. The official link is rather understated, but the speakers are first class [Update" here's the preliminary agenda]. They include Eben Moglen, economist and Free Software researcher Rishab Ghosh, FSFE’s very own Carlo Piana, and the project lead for Munich’s Read more »
I’m Bucharest this weekend for the Coliberator conference, organised by FSFE associate organisation Ceata. In one of my talks, I presented FSFE, and talked about things we can work on together. In the discussion that followed, we collected problems that Free Software is facing in Romania. It’s a rough-and-ready list of points, collected on a Read more »
For the second time, the European Parliament has asked its internal administration to prepare a full report on how the Parliament uses and develops Free Software. Our friends over at EPFSUG have been pushing hard for this for a long time, and we at FSFE have helped where we could: 48. Requests for the second time, Read more »
Keynote delivered at the European Parliament, Brussels, 2013-03-27 Document Freedom Day is an annual campaign to build awareness for Open Standards and interoperability. Over 50 events are taking place today around the world around this date, from Nicaragua to Taiwan to Ghana. Open Standards and interoperability help to put us in control of the technology Read more »
Microsoft just can’t avoid getting into trouble with competition watchdogs. Today, the European Commission slapped the company with a fine of EUR 561 million (ca. USD 731 million) for breaching a 2009 settlement over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Under this agreement, Microsoft promised to display a “browser choice” screen on Windows installs Read more »
Today’s the day to say “thank you” to the people who make Free Software. Obviously, I use a lot of the big, well-known products all day, every day: the GNU operating system, the Linux kernel, emacs, mutt, LibreOffice, Firefox, and so on, and I’m grateful to the thousands of people who have built these programs Read more »
Among all the Free Software and Open Standards posts on this blog, here’s a personal announcement.On Sunday a week ago, I had a sports accident that left me with a broken foot. During a game of capoeira, my partner’s shin ended up on top of my foot, and I ended up on top of his Read more »
Today is a good day for Free Software companies in the UK. The UK government is certainly taking a long and winding road towards Free Software and Open Standards. The UK’s public sector doesn’t use a lot of Free Software, and many smaller Free Software companies have found it comparatively hard to get public sector Read more »
On Tuesday, I went to Amsterdam to talk about “How Software Patents Are Delaying The Future” (pdf, 79kB), on a discussion panel organised by the European Patent Office. The other people on the panel were patent attorney Simon Davies and Ioannis Bozas, a patent examiner at the EPO. The panel was moderated by James Nurton Read more »
We have learned that the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee has taken the unitary patent off the agenda for its meeting today and tomorrow. We expect that the discussion will take place later in the fall of this year. This means that there is more time for you to discuss software patents and the unitary Read more »