Ciarán's free software notes

Below is a list of free software videos. I find videos to be an extrememly valuable learning tool - and often interesting and entertaining. I don't think I'd be able to maintain a list, which is why this is going in my blog instead of on a webpage. If you'd like to maintain such a list, I hope the below links are a good place to start.

• The GNU project philosophy audio page: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/
• The GNU project french recordings page: http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/francais/ (not sure why it's separate)
• The links section of the Wikipedia article on Richard Stallman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#External_links
• The links section of the Wikipedia article on Richard Stallman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen#Video.2C_audio.2C_and_transcripts
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig#Audio.2FVideo
• http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/barcelona-summaries
• Free Electrons have a list, mostly technical, but some on software freedom: http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/conferences/
• Free Electrons also have a seperate French page: http://free-electrons.com/communaute/videos/conferences/
• One video of Georg Greve: http://www.wsa-conference.org/video/greve.mov
• Some Georg Greve videos on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=georg%20greve
• A video of Federico Heinz: http://www.archive.org/download/Ifso_Federico_Heinz/20060429_FedericoHeinz_PublicAdministration.ogg

If you know of more, please post them here as a comment or email me at ciaran at fsfe dot org and I'll add them to this list.

A Newsforge journalist contacted the GPLv3 discussion committees to ask if they are being listened to by FSF, and if the 2nd draft of GPLv3 includes they're input. All who responded said yes to both.

Here's the story: Torvalds' comments on GPLv3 committees refuted. The reason for that title is that Linus Torvalds said last week that he heard that FSF had ignored the discussion committees. I'm glad to hear his information was wrong.

That article doesn't explain the role of the discussion committees, so I'll just sketch it out quickly here.

The discussion committees are made up of people who have some interest in making the GNU GPL as good as possible. This includes many who are not supporters of the free software movement's goals.

There are four committees, grouped by topic, with a total of something like 130 members:

• Committee A: commercial vendors (member list)
• Committee B: free software projects (member list)
• Committee C: lawyers (member list)
• Committee D: developers (member list)

Each comment that the public submits through gplv3.fsf.org goes to these committees where they group the comments into issues, and collect all the views on these issues and suggestions for how to address them.

For more information on the process, see FSFE's GPLv3 project page.