pichel’s blog

So I was in Nantes this year to attend to the 10th edition of RMLL, a french acronym for Free Software Worldwide  Meeting. The term Wordwide is a bit exagerated since most of the conferences were given in French, and that the Association Village had mostly welcome french projects. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that about 30 % of the speeches were given in English… and that it is allways possible to speak English or French with hands, even with french people 🙂

Arriving monday in the afternoon, I was picked up by Rainer at the station, and we drove nearly two hours to reach the camping site, because of traffic jams caused by works on the road. We then discovered that driving in Nantes is often a bad option…

The booths were in a nice venue, even if organised in a too strict disposition that didn’t fit so well with opennes and diversity of people around there. More freedom, respecting security and practicability constraints would have been appreciated from many, but sure we have to recongnize it was a tough job to organize all this !

I helped Rainer at the FSFE stand the week long, despite beeing often away too because of all the insteresting conferences running all day. Every morning I came to the boss with my agenda asking for this or that schedule… with a laughing Rainer answering that I will never hold it – and it was always true :-)) We had a good help at the booth from a new Fellow from paris, Olivier which is working in a business about open and hackable devices. He held the stand few hours on Friday which aloowed me to attend to many interesting things.

This was the first time I attended such an event and held a booth for FSFE. I have to admit that I’ve been really surprised by how people got the FSFE message. I was afraid that the kind of topic FSFE deals with would seem too evaporated to people, but it was all the contrary : they seem to have empathy and sympathy for such jobs, and a good will to sustain it. The recent actuality having raised new threats for Freedom has certainly also raised people awareness about the Freedom concern that goes with Free Software. I went to talk and learn technics and I came back having talked about politics much more !

This was definitely a really good week, for us and also for FSFE which gained a lot of awareness in the french Free Software community.

Some interesting topics we dealt with :

• I had a very inresting talk with a collaborative from the City of Nantes who has been struggling for Free Software inside the office, and with the representatives for nearly seven years now ! He is still looking for material, ideas, arguments, tools to continue his battle. He’s already made some very interesting remarks and asled written questions to the representative, receiving only partial and off topic answers by now. This could be a topic where maybe FSFE could help. But it’s a huge job as every bit would have to be localized to conform local laws and habits.
• The licensing problem is one of the hottest for projects that are about to go public when having grown enough between the core developpers. I had a couple of talks with people from projects at this point. To put it short they want to distribute their piece of software now, make the stuff free… but they realise that crossing this point their level of insecurity will increase as they may have violate patents, or aren’t that much clean about their code “My stuff is Free, but I’ve used library X of which I’m not really sure of”. Well FTF is no way going to unemployment 🙂
• Part of the FSFE sympathy’s capital comes from it’s FSF like movement. Lots of people were happy to buy something from FSF’ sister organisation. So, whichever differences that happen to exist between the two organisations, the existence of a european level Free Sofware organisation is well perceived (even if they don’t perveive the inherent differences in speech and habits).

Another important topic that is not discussed here is Net Neutrality which has been extensively discussed at the political round table, but which will be the subject of another post to try to keep this one reasonable long.

Thanks a lot to Rainer that drove we the week long, while I was playing the GPS… with varying mileage :-)) Thanks and hello to all the nice guys (and girls) we met here : TuxFamily, Rhien, ubuntu-fr.org, Quimper LUG, April, FFII, and all those simple human beings with a laptop screwed under their wristles that we met, and that bring their bits of Freedom in their day to day activities.

Where Free Software is not that much about Software than about Freedom…

and I surely appreciate that !

Finally it’s somewhat reassuring to see that some institutions are still defending the essential principles of democracy, as they were thought 200 years ago. The Constitutional Council (approximative traduction) has finally decided that two dispositions of the voted law were disagreeing too strong with some principles. And it is interesting to understand which of them.

First of all : freedom of speech. And they haven’t gone into the constitution to defend that, but relied on the 1789’s Humans Right Declaration ! It’s 11th article states (approximately) :

Free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious human rights : every citizen has so the right to talk, write, print freely, apart from having to respond to abuse of this freedom to the extent determined by law.

The council estimated that nowadays, the freedom of talking, wrinting and printing was to be declined and extended to the freedom of publishing stuff on the Internet, and that deprivating Internet access to someone was in consequence a privation of freedom. As a consequence, such a sentence can only be pronouced by a judge and not a simple administrative commission.

Secondly, the text introduced the obligation for the acused person (which is only the owner of the Internet access) to produce the proof of his innocence. This clearly violates the principle that every person accusated of anything is to be considered as non-guilty untill the end of the judgment.

Nowadays, every politician, every buisinessman, want things to go fast, even in juridic matters, and they’re trying to automate all this. The Constitutional Council opportunately reminds them of the principles of democracy. Privating thousands of people from certain liberties in an automated way, IS NOT a democratic way of getting things done, in any manner. Dot.

Yesterday was a funny bad day. It was still funny because nobody in the coucil had Internet connection, just as if they were already applying Hadopi at it’s first day of legal existence… At least that what I answered to everybody that was inquiring me about their Internet connection 🙂

Despite of that, it was still bad, because we lost a great part of the Internet, a part that shouldn’t be lost : it’s neutrality. Covered by the duty to save big industries, the law will enforce packet filtering at the ISP level, and once the tools will be on, who will be able to point out that ISP A transports his content faster than the one from IPB B ? And that the government won’t later come in and ask them to search for any ‘terrosrist’ keywords ?

There is still hope at the european level that this law will be censored. But we have to carefully elect deputees on behalf of their awareness about Free Software. A useful tool in France is provided by candidate.fr who sent a declaration to be signed at every candidate : http://www.candidats.fr/europarl2009/ or in english if you prefer : http://www.candidats.fr/europarl2009/. Indeed, the very low amount of signature at this time leaves few doubt about the general awareness of those people on Free Software 🙁

I wonder if there are such initiative in other european countries… of course, but where ?

Hello, this is an information that could eventually fit on fsfe’s events page… I don’t know, maybe someone will help me decide.

I live in and occasionnally work for the Parc Naturel du Vercors (in France), and we are organising events around Free Software around the different villages to let people know about Free Software.

We already made two of these events which were very interesting and gave a good show of Free Software in action to the audience. We are planning three more this winter and spring in the area… I’d like to present them on the FSFE website. My problem is that even if I’m a Fellow, I do not have any french material of the FSFE to produce. Now I know where the source documents are, but I’m not sure I’ll have time until the next event to translate some.

If you’re interested in looking at what it looks on the net, look at this page of the Parc du Vercors’ website, you can also have a small relation of the event on this page of the G3L website (G3L is an association of people spreading Free Software in our area, with some smart nerds capable of incredible things in xorg.conf :-). Last time we installed 3 GNU/linux system, including one on the mayor’s laptop !

My personal count at this time for 2008 is : 10 penguins 🙂

Go on free.