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 »
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 »
There’s a new essay on gnu.org about Avoiding Ruinous Compromises. I guess the main point is that if we want the freedoms of free software to eventually come as standard, we need people to take freedom into consideration when choosing software. Or as Stallman puts it, we need to change people’s mindset, rather than looking Read more »
(Post publication note: I hoped to come back and finish this, but haven’t found time yet. As a software freedom lobbyist in Brussels, I’m worried by the prospect of anti-free-software corporations being able to claim to represent the free software community. Funding software development is fine, but we need to make clear that, politically, these Read more »
Sorry for this short notice, but since I’ve just been added to the planet.grep.be blog aggregation, I decided it’s worth a quick mention. Tonight’s meeting is a small, informal one at 20:00 in Café Walvis, 209 Antoine Dansaertstraat. We hope to soon launch larger meetings which will be held on Sunday afternoons every 3 months. Read more »
Groklaw now has a page of Sean Daly’s interviews – I’ve been asking for this for a while. Old article about privacy problems with Google’s desktop software – I started looking into this because I read an article about the new version of KDE boasting that Google’s desktop software could now be integrated into KDE. Read more »
I was impressed recently by the progress of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The maps of most big cities (in Europe at least) are already very complete, e.g. Dublin and Brussels. Many smaller cities and cities in less developed countries are still in need of work, but the current status clearly proves that the project’s aims are practical. Read more »
Elections for one community seat on Wikipedia’s nine-person Board of Trustees will close at midnight on June 21st. I’m eligible to vote, and, for reasons I’ll discuss next week, I have a sudden interest in communiy voting. The criteria for eligibility to vote are that you have a certain number of edits to a Wikimedia Read more »
A few weeks ago, FSFE co-launched the Open Parliament petition, along with Esoma and OpenForum Europe. Here’s a summary of why we’re asking you to sign it, and we hope you’ll point others to it. The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for Read more »
There’s now an open standards project section on the fsfeurope.org website. There are links to our previous documents, including the ones about ISO and OOXML. Maybe most interesting is that there’s a definition of open standards that we endorse. We didn’t write this definition, but we took part in it’s drafting, and many of our Read more »