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In 26 days there is Document Freedom Day. And after Edgar already gave information about their activity in Offenburg (Germany), and FSUGItalia also posted information I feed obliged to not wait any longer.
This year three DFD groups will have a joint activity in Berlin, Cologne, and Vienna. I will not yet tell you all the details but let me say: There will be a winner of our price in Germany and one in Austria, the price will be a DFD tart, there will be lot of fun, and we will rOGG.
The topic of those three groups will be the Open Standard for
audio OGG Vorbis. The groups already translated Playogg.org into German and sent it to our sister organisation FSF for publication on the website.
In Berlin and Cologne the groups will meet at about 14:45. Exact times and places will be announced on the mailing lists below. So everybody interested to participate in one of those cities, please contact:
You can be sure that you will have a lot of fun and that you do something good for Open Standards and Free Software. We will keep you informed.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
Yesterday at the Fellowship meeting in Berlin Ali Gunduz gave a talk about the “Fully Free GNU/Linux Distribution Movement”. Here the abstract:
For the past few years, a growing number of GNU/Linux distributions have been started with the specific goal of ensuring users’ software freedoms before everything else. In this presentation, I will try to draw an overview of the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement and provoke participants to think about software distributors’ ethical responsibilities. What aspects of mainstream GNU/Linux distributions does this movement not find sufficient? Which distributions align themselves with the movement? What is their rationale for limiting functionality of their software offerings in the name of upholding user freedoms? What does a binary blob mean and what does the Linux-libre Project claim to accomplish that the vanilla kernel Linux doesn’t? How does the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement affect the rest of the free software ecosystem? I am planning to keep the overall tone of the discussion newcomer-friendly while also providing some food for thought for the technically inclined.
It was a very interesting discussion. After the talk, when I bought something to drink from Martin, who is working for the newthinking store, he showed me he already tested the Trisquel Live-CD on his notebook and everything including Wifi was working.
Also on the agenda was the preperation for the Document Freedom Day on March 31st. I am already looking forward to it.
Before we left the Newthinking Store, Martin took a picture of all people not afraid to see their picture on the internet showing Ali our love with a big group hug.
 Fellowship Group hugging Ali –
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
as you know from my blog title I love it here, and I love Free Software. As there are many people out there who also love Free Software we thought it would be good to have this as theme for a lovely FSFE campaign. So we have choosen this years Valentine’s Day on Sunday 14th February for this.
On our Valentine’s Day page you find suggestions what you can do to show your love to Free Software. Ranging from buying a developer a drink, donating to a Free Software organisation or hugging a developer. I am already very interested what you will come up with.
You can also use one of the nice “I love Free Software” graphics Markus Meier kindly made for us.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
es gibt zwar keine ganz direkte Verbindung zu Freier Software, dachte
mir aber, dass es trotzdem hier in meinen Blog passt:
Ausblick 2010 von irights.info mit Themen von Adwords, Vorratsdatenspeicherung, Netzsperrengesetz, GEZ für Computer, Reform des TMG (hier kam FS zumindest vor), Änderungen im Datenschutzrecht, …
(Quelle: Irights.info).
Von unserer (FSFE) Seite wird dieses Jahr natürlich wieder die FTF um rechtlicher Themen Freier Software kümmern.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
We are looking for a photograph which we can use to promote PDFreaders.org in an upcomming activity. We had the idea of one of this street signs (e.g. at highways) were the government or the European Union are advertising a project (e.g. this bridge is sponsered by the EU and XY).
We want to modify it, so we have something like:
“To drive on that highway you need a [car manufacturer]. You can do a gratis test drive at your local [car manufacturer] dealer. Your government.”
That is like the Adobe advertisement on many websites from the public adminstration.
We would need a high quality picture of one of those signs, the right for us to modify it, so we can use it on our websites and give the press the right so they can use it however they like. So if you are able to sent us a photograph (either made by yourself, a friend of you, or you find it on the internet with the necessary rights for us), please sent it to pdfreaders at fsfeurope.org. Looking forward to your help.
PS: You can already help us a lot by linking to PDFreaders when you offer PDFs on your website. E.g. by using one of our pdfreaders graphics Markus Meier kindly made for us. I would also like to thank Stian for the two small images at the buttom and Sylvain Beucler for providing the French version.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
There will be an election for a second Fellowship seat in FSFE’s General Assembly between the 1st and 28th February 2010. The winner of the election will help FSFE’s strategic decision making body plan the future of the organisation, and will join Torsten Grote, who occupies the first Fellowship seat since earlier last year.
Both Fellowship representatives are full members of the General Assembly, and have all the rights and obligations of other members. Now the details of the election:
- Who can vote? All registered Fellows can vote.
- Who can be elected? To be a candidate, you need to have been an active Fellow for at least a year before the election. This helps to make sure that the people elected into the GA are familiar with the organisation and its work.
- Election Platform All candidates should use the wiki and/or blog as a promotion platform, so that it will be possible for their Fellow voters to know them. (You can also choose to make the wiki page only visible for other Fellows)
- Voting System For the voting process we will use the Schulze method, a popular voting system used by Debian, Wikimedia and others. It is a well tested method and has proven to be resistant to voting anomalies.
To become a candidate, please send an e-mail, NO LATER THAN 25 January 2010 to fellowship@fsfeurope.org with the subject line “Candidate Fellowship seat.” In the email you should state that you want to run for election into the GA along with information about yourself, which we can use to compile the list of candidates for all Fellows like last year.
You can only register yourself as a candidate; suggesting others is not possible. But if you know other Fellows that you consider would be good candidates, please motivate them to register themselves. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact me via fellowship@fsfeurope.org. For reference also see:
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
As Andreas Tolf Tolfsen already pointed out, we are currently restructuring FSFE’s websites. As Andreas already said, when you are interested in the process please join our web team coordinaton list.
Hugo Roy also worked on the contribute page which was kind of a “side product” of the process. Yesterday Andreas uploaded the changes to the contribute section, and Björn Schießle already translated it into German. I am looking forward to your feedback on that page.
Since today I am officially in vacation mode. Beside enjoing the snow outside I used some of my free time to finally move all the information Nils assembled about FSFE’s logo usage on the style guide page. So it should now be available to all our designers in a convenient way.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
Would you go to a job interview in your sweatpants? Would you sent your CV with handwritten corrections? If you answer those questions with no, you might also want to write professional e-mails. The Free Software community is a tough environment when it comes to e-mail usage. This short guide tries to help you that the community perceive you as a professional communicator.
Quotation As a general rule: Do not quote the whole e-mail again, neither above your message, below or in the middle. Quote only the parts which are necessary. Use inline replying (for examples see Wikipedia’s article on posting style) and trim messages if possible.
Subject Choose a good meaningful subject line. “e-mail”, “help”, “hello”, or “questions” are not good subjects ;). When the topic of an e-mail changes, it helps to change the subject, too. Often it is beneficial to separated threads into different thread with different subjects.
Line break of e-mails Should be around 72 characters. Nobody will kill you if it is 70 or 74 or even 76. But a lot of people will get angry if you do not have a line break at all.
E-Mail signature Keep it small and simple. Signatures longer than five lines should be avoided. The separated for the signature is “-- ” (minus minus blank) and then line break. The blank is important as many e-mail programs then know that it is a signature.
Mailinglists Use list-reply. It is not necessary to include the sender in To: or Cc: if he is subscribed. If the e-mail programs are configured correct the sender will be Cc’ed if he is not subscribed or wishes to be Cc’ed.
Forwarding e-mails When you forward e-mails try to give a short summary of the e-mail. Forwarding a huge e-mail thread to a list with only “FYI” will make you no friends.
General remark The better you structure an e-mail and the better you present the content — the higher is the chance that people will read your e-mail.
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Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE’s Fellowship and protect your freedom!
After my last year’s blog entry on Free Software books for friends I received new recommendations for this year. So I read them, and here my new list of Free Software related books 2009 which are also good for people who have not heard much about Free Software before:
 The books
- Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. The book about Free Culture. After reading you cannot prevent from getting interested in that topic. Lot of parts feels like reading a thriller. All people whom I gave it loved it.
- Joshua Gay (Ed.): Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Definitely the English classic for Free Software. A selection of Richard’s essays from GNU’s philosophy pages in book form. (In former times I printed out the articles from GNU philosophy and put them in the boothroom. My flatemate at that time said it is perfect there to read and think about it.
 )
- Lawrence Lessig: Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. The book was on one of my professor’s literature lists on regulation. It helped my understanding the political dimension software. Afterwards I used it for writing, it also made it into my diploma thesis. It describes how law, norms, market and architecture — which also includes software — regulate our life. If you have friends who are interested in politics, it is the book I recommend them to read. (PDF of the new version).
- Glyn Moody Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. The book is based on interviews with Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, and others. Good documentary about the history of Free Software. From the beginings of GNU until the end of the 90s. I liked reading all the quotes from different people from our community. But you should be a bit interested in technical details or at least like reading about different hardware architetures, programming languages, kernels, etc. To put it short: If you have been at FOSDEM before and you liked it there, read that book and you feel like beeing at FOSDEM again.
- Neal Stephenson In the Beginning…Was the Command Line. Yes, Neal Stephenson has also written about his experiences with Free Software. Nice short reading about his own computer history. Perfect book for a long flight trip.
And as I happen to speak German, here a list of German books:
- Lawrence Lessig: Freie Kultur is the German version of “Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity” (see above).
- Volker Grassmuck: Freie Software. The German classic. You need no technical background to understand it. Usually I order at least 10 of them at a time. For only 2 EUR per book it is very good as a small present. Also during the year. Everytime a friend (in my case my colleagues know about Free Software) has no clue about Free Software I can through one of the books at him
- V. Djordjevic, R.A. Gehring, V. Grassmuck, T. Kreutzer und M. Spielkamp: Urheberrecht im Alltag (PDF version 15 MB). This is the book version of irights.info, a portal for all kind of questions and answers about copyright in the digital work. Your friends ask you if it is allowed to copy software, music, movies? Or how they can publish their own works? This book is a good reference book for people who want to fast find short answers to their questions. As for Volker Grassmuck’s “Freie Software” I also recommend to order some more.
- Lawrence Lessig: Code und andere Gesetze des Cyberspace. German version of “Code and other laws of cyberspace” above.
As last year, if you have suggestions, please write an e-mail to our public discussion list or to me in private.
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Support Free Software — Join FSFE’s Fellowship!
Eine weitere Hausarbeit, die ich heute hochgeladen habe. Dieses Mal im Bereich BWL ““Unsere Mitarbeiter sind zufrieden, also sind wir Erfolgreich!” Überlegungen zur Messung von Effektivität von Nonprofit-Organisationen”. (Der Titel war vorgegeben, ich hätte den Blogtitel gewählt).
(2008-01-11 Sprache: Deutsch) In dieser Arbeit wird die Frage behandelt, auf was NPOs bei der Effektivitätsmessung achten müssen. Dabei wird argumentiert, dass NPOs messbare Ziel finden müssen, welche mit dem Missionsziel harmonieren. Die kurzfristigen Ziele und die Verbesserung von Messergebnissen, dürfen nicht vom eigentlichen Missionsziel abhalten. Die Sachzielorientierung und Verschiedenartigkeit der Ziele bei NPOs macht eine multidimensionale Messung erforderlich. Besonders die Bewertung der Stakeholder ist bei NPOs hervorzuheben. Des Weiteren kann eine Aussage zur Effektivität immer nur im Vergleich zu anderen NPOs getroffen werden. PDF-Version herunterladen
Ich finde das Thema immer noch spannend, weil es mich natürlich interessiert, wie andere and ich z.B. die Effektivität der FSFE beurteilen können.
Monty-Python-Fans sollten die Einleitung lesen. Zumindest meine Professorin meinte, es wäre die beste Einleitung gewesen, die sie je gelesen hat. Sowas hört man doch gerne
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