Aside from more bug fixing, we now have functional trackbacks on the Fellowship site. New blog entries can now ping successfully external sites. Also blog entries now from this site show a trackback link so that other sites can ping the articles that Fellows write on their blog. Report any problems on the forum. Thank you for your support.

Andrea and Wouter both will receive a HP Compaq Notebook – both pre-installed with Debian GNU/Linux.
We congratulate the lucky winners and thank all of you for joining this great community!

FSFE will offer to these volunteers the possibility to take training classes with eZ Systems – courses are most commonly held in Norway, Germany, France. FSFE funds don't allow covering the travel and lodging expenses of the chosen volunteers for the duration of the courses.

The volunteers' job will be done via remote access once the training is complete.

Please submit your application and a short curriculum vitae to maffulli AT fsfeurope .org

"It makes a very sad and worrysome statement about the quality and reliability of software engineering at Microsoft if they indeed do not have proper interface specifications and documentation for their considerably complex and organic systems, as Microsoft have repeatedly maintained," explains Jonas Öberg, vice-president of FSFE. "That 'hundreds of Microsoft employees and contractors' [1] were apparently not able to produce this documentation in almost two years further undermines the confidence in Microsoft's technological prowess."

"That Microsoft now questions the competency and integrity of a Trustee they themselves helped appoint is outrageous. All the parties involved in the case found the Trustee showed an intimate competence and understanding," says Carlo Piana, the lawyer representing FSFE on the case: "How do they now dare maintain that he is biased? Because he is not willing to lie against all evidence? We support the Commission all the way, and possibly beyond. And: If Microsoft wanted to know how it could easily comply, they just had to ring Volker Lendecke, member of the Samba Team, one of our technical experts, as we offered them"

"Microsoft has behaved as if they consider themselves above the law and any decision by the European Commission. The aggressive stance they now take towards a Commission that was unbelievably patient with Microsoft further confirms that view," concludes Georg Greve. "Microsoft strove very hard to be the first company to leave the European Commission no choice but to impose daily fines for the first time in European antitrust history. Microsoft deserves to be granted what they worked for so vehemently and be brought to compliance the hard way."

Following a decision at the last foundation board meeting of FKF to co-operate more closely with FSF Europe, as well as a decision by the members of the FSFE Team, both organisations are delighted to announce their official co-operation. The FKF is the first associate organisation of the FSFE in Spain, a country with a strong Free Software community.
"Our adversaries are usually multi-national groups, funded heavily by multi-national companies. If we are to defend Free Software and all that is related to it against their encroachments, then we need to be equally present," explains Georg Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europe. "That is why FSFE started out as a multi-national organisation from the outset, building teams across cultural and language barriers to work together to further Free Software. We are very happy to welcome another group to our large family."
"While we are focused on Free Knowledge, Free Software, Free Standards and Intellectual Wealth dissemination, Free Software is at the centre of our work, as the initiating and inspiring phenomenon of this new way of understanding knowledge.", says Pablo Machón, President of FKF. "The FSFE has always been an inspiration for our work. Becoming an associated organisation of FSFE is, thus, a natural consequence of sharing ideals, a long-term vocation, and working together towards the same goal."

About the Free Knowledge Foundation (FKF)

The Free Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organisation based in Spain and focused on Free Knowledge, Free Software, Free Standards and Intellectual Wealth dissemination. The FKF promotes the concept of knowledge as being publicly and freely accessible for both usage and contribution.
www.libre.org

La licenza GNU GPL è la licenza per il Software Libero più usata al
mondo. Quasi tre quarti di tutti i programmi liberi sono distribuiti
con questa licenza. Fin dalla prima revisione, più di 15 anni fa, il
modo di sviluppare software e i modelli commerciali per la distribuzione
di software sono cambiati enormemente.

Il 16 Gennaio la FSF ha avviato un processo strutturato sollecitando
riscontri dalla comunità con lo scopo di produrre una licenza che
difenda al meglio la libertà e serva la comunità e le aziende. Il
processo include discussioni pubblice, identificazione di problemi,
considerazioni e ragionamenti su questi problemi e pubblicazione di
responsi. La pubblicazione della seconda bozza è prevista per l'estate
del 2006 e un ultimo giro di commenti, o una bozza finale, saranno
pronte per l'autunno del 2006. La licenza finale GPLv3 è attesa non più
tardi della primavera del 2007.

L'appuntamento è per Venerdì 10 Febbraio alle 18:30 presso la sede del
Master:
ALMA Graduate School
Villa Guastavillani
Via degli Scalini, 18
40136 – Bologna

Questo appuntamento è parte di una serie di eventi e conferenze
nazionali ed internazionali per il progetto GPLv3. Nelle prossime
settimane saranno annunciati altri incontri.

First, the blog entries can now be edited with a full blown WYSYWIG editor. No need to fiddle with < > and html tags.

Second, blog entries now support tags: tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to any blog entry. As del.icio.us put it,

Tagging can be a whole lot easier and more flexible than fitting your
 information into preconceived categories. If you want to post an article about a little
 known Greek philosopher, just tag it with "philosophy greece" or whatever other tags
 you'd want to use to find it again. You don't have to rely on the designer of the system
 to provide you with category for Greek philosophy. You just make up tags as you need
 them.

Have fun exploring these improvements and, as usual, report problems and give suggestions for improvements on the forum.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) critically reviews Microsoft's offer to publish source code instead of protocols.

Georg Greve, President of FSFE explains: "The European Commission asked Microsoft to publish their protocols to allow others to write interoperable software and to re-establish competition. That does not appear to have happened, at least the terms under which the protocols are supposedly available are not clear. What they have done instead is publish source code, which they weren't asked to do."

In a press release Microsoft announced yesterday "to license all the Windows Server source code". This would underscore Microsoft's "commitment to resolve compliance issues".

According to FSFE this would not be of any help, but would cause additional troubles. Carlo Piana, FSFE's lawyer explains: "This 'commitment' is poisoned – they do it in a way that worsens the situation for Free Software: Because that source code is under Microsoft copyright, developers who have seen the source code cannot reimplement it in Free Software for fear of copyright violation."

Even worse, "Microsoft might try to shut down competition by making claims of copyright infringement based on the argument that the developer 'could' have looked at the source code", Piana forecasts.

Georg Greve adds: "Indeed. How exactly are developers supposed to write interoperable software without looking at the source code if the specifications are not available? If you eat from that apple, you find yourself poisoned by their copyright."

After their welcoming of Microsoft's new 'Shared Source' Licences which were substantially improved over their previous licensing proposals, FSFE was willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

"It now seems clear this was just another marketing ploy: Yesterday Microsoft acted like a robber that, when asked to please put away the gun, tosses you a grenade. Our praise seemed premature in hindsight", Greve finishes.

These days, FSFE meets adversaries of freedom in various venues: In Brussels, the 'Intellectual Property Rights European Enforcement Directive' (IPRED2) is being pushed by the rights-holding industry, and Microsoft has shown that it was able to rewrite the Vienna Conclusions on ICT and Creativity for the UN World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).

Read the full press release