My FSFE Blog

Last night I presented a talk at the London Mac Users Group on unix security and how it relates to Mac OS X.

[ My Beer and Speech blog link about the talk ]

I gave an introduction about myself before the main technical content and managed to slip in a few slides about what the FSFE does and also the DefectiveByDesign.org message about the iTunes store and general DRM concerns.

All of the FSFE leaflets and DefectivebyDesign leaflets that I took were taken away by the audience so hopefully a message was communicated to at least some of them.

Getting my laptop ready for the presentation. I presented using SUSE 10.1 on a IBM thinkpad and OpenOffice

Today I discovered the cool FSFE wallpapers and artwork on the Fellowship site… such an occasion requires a screenshot!

[ Larger version ] 

I also saw the offer to create FSFE flavoured GDM themes and seeing as there was nothing good to watch on TV tonight…

[ Larger version ] 

You can download the theme here but it has one major bug. The theme name and description is only there for the English locale. Sorry to all Fellows using non English locales… send me the translation and we can post it to the "Fun" area of the Fellowship site. 

I’m really excited to hear that Gareth is organising a Defective by Design event outside of the Apple Store on Saturday 30th September.

 I’ll be there for sure and I’m hoping to take my 4 year old son and dog along complete with Hazmat suits 🙂
 

Some of you may have already seen this but there is a fairly balanced forum thread about FSF, FSFE and its purpose on the LUGRadio forums

A while ago Huxley mailed the FSFE-UK mailing list about some misleading information about Free Software on a Government funded website.

The ICT Hub website provides Information Technology information to voluntary and community organisations in the UK. As Huxley pointed out some of the information about Free Software is at best vague and at worst damaging to the cause of Free Software.

You can read the articles that cause concern here and here

I’ve tried to start a conversation with them and hopefully we can provide some more accurate information. My initial email is here

Software Freedom Day is fast approaching – I’m hoping the event we have planned in London is going to be suitably awesome 🙂

The meeting is starting at midday in Regents Park with a (newly termed) advocacy walk.

This involves our LUG members (and we hope to have some visitors from other LUGs in South East England) taking to the streets on a 3/4 mile route taking the message of Free Software to the masses

We have Ubuntu CDs and leaflets to distribute and I hope we can get the message across to at least a couple of people.

The end of the route is our regular Westminster University Campus building. At 1300 we have a technical meeting with some great presentations:

• Malcolm Yates from Canonical speaking about Ubuntu
• Jim Bailey from GLLUG talking about WordPress installation, configuration, usage
• Bryn Reeves from Red Hat speaking about the Linux kernel and SystemTap
• Simon Morris (that’s me!!) talking about securing USB memory sticks with encrypted filesystems

After the meeting we have the function room in the King and Queen pub on Foley Street booked for beer, debate and celebration.

If you happen to be in London on this day please come along – it’s going to be great

Firstly I’ll begin with some form of "life update".

I’ve been "disconnected" for most of August – it began with a week in the English county of Cornwall on holiday. I am lucky that my parents bought a small house in Launceston (on the Cornwall/Devon border) a few years ago and they are kind enough to let my young family and I use it a few times a year.

Life in Cornwall is very much different than in London – for a start my poor old car struggled a lot with the steep inclines of the county and I had to wonder each night if my handbrake would be strong enough to stop it rolling off into the night as I slept.

It is a beautiful part of the world, and I really would recommend you visit it. Especially for British people at the moment with the airport security restrictions making escaping the country a miserable experience.

Returning from Cornwall I had the pleasure of entertaining Shane Coughlan for a night after he presented a talk at the Greater London Linux User Group. As before when he visited the LUG he is an excellent speaker and I know the audience appreciated his words.

And to round up my excuse for not blogging here for a month… I moved house! There isn’t a lot to say except that I am never moving again. When the day comes (hopefully in quite a few years) when I leave this mortal existance please just bury me in the garden somewhere. Moving house is a miserable experience but I am very happy with the new place.

So – onto matters of Free Software and the FSFE. I write this as a new member of the foundation, and as someone that hasn’t so far done a great deal to promote the Foundation to my peers in London.

My question is "What exactly do we do?". I’m not asking as a form of saying "we don’t do enough" but I feel the Foundations purpose is either unclear in some respects, or not communicated well enough to prospective new members.

I joined the FSFE so I could use it as a method to advocate more effectively – I could go to an organisation or individual and promote the principles of Free Software and GNU/Linux and then back it up with the statement "If you would like to know more please see this organisation of which I am a part" and then point to the FSF/FSFE/FSFEurope websites.

However, if a member of my local LUG would approach me and ask what the FSFE does as an organisation I would struggle to explain effectively.

The work done against Software Patents in Europe has been well documented and of course it isn’t over yet (or is it?) but what else do we do?

I could also point to advocacy, education, peaceful demonstrations and campaigning but can you provide more specific tangible examples of the FSFE at work.

Thank you fellow Fellows!

Linus has made some comments on the GPLv3 and it’s anti-DRM stance:

"Say I’m a hardware manufacturer. I decide I love some particular piece of open-source software, but when I sell my hardware, I want to make sure it runs only one particular version of that software, because that’s what I’ve validated. So I make my hardware check the cryptographic signature of the binary before I run it," Torvalds said. "The GPLv3 doesn’t seem to allow that, and in fact, most of the GPLv3 changes seem to be explicitly designed exactly to not allow the above kind of use, which I don’t think it has any business doing."

Hardware vendors could take advantage of Free Software for their devices but then refuse any modifed versions of the code to run. I think this would be a huge shame and if vendors had started doing this we might not have great projects such as Linux on iPod, OpenWRT and OpenZaurus

I found an example today of why the ambiguity of the term "Open Source" can be dangerous.

Some folks have written a web management interface for MySQL (similar to PhpMyAdmin) and announced it on Digg.com

The article headline read "MySQL Quick Admin Becomes Open-Source Freeware" which is rather unfortunate as no-one had any idea what they could do with the code.

Even worse they didn’t state on their website (or apparently in the code itself) how the code was licenced so it was all a bit of a mess

Although their intentions were good they got a rough ride on Digg.com in part for some UI design and functionality reasons, but also because their message about their intent for the code wasn’t clear.