Ciarán's free software notes

A fortnight ago was the annual General Assembly meeting of FSFE. I'm not a member of the GA, but I was invited as an observer since I'm working full-time with them.

The venue was in Manchester, England, and there were England flags everywhere. I was worried that maybe this was a sign of a new separatist movement to take England out of the United Kingdom, but Gareth Bowker assured me that the flags were there because of a football competition.

No one was particularly curious about British cuisine, and there are Indian restaurants everywhere, so we ate curry each day - sometimes twice a day.

During the GA, there were the constitutionally mandatory things such as confirming accounts and accepting minutes of previous meetings. More time was spent making oral reports, reviewing the past year, and planning the coming year.

The only thing that continued uninterrupted was the incidental process of getting to know each other better. It can be very difficult to work on important projects with people whom you've never met (or rarely meet). We were together from midday Friday to midday Monday, but it wasn't enough time.

Henrik Sandklef also wrote a blog entry mostly about the GA.

The first talk I went to was Richard Stallman, talking about software patents. I've heard that talk before, but there were some improvements and updates, and the Q&A was very interesting. There was a camera team recording the whole thing, but I think they do that every year and no recordings have appeared online after any of the previous FOSDEMs. Pity. (If you like recordings, FSF have their own page of audio/video recordings from other events.)

After him, Pieter Hintjens, current President of FFII, had a 10 minute slot. Unfortunately, I think many people thought that Pieter was going to talk for an hour, so some people left at the start of his slot to go to other talks. He gave a concise explanation of FFII's work and the direction they're moving in.

After a break, Richard came back to give a presentation on GPLv3. This was interesting and I think it was his first. It was short and I recorded it on my digital camera. I'll try to get that online quickly.

I then met with others from FSFE to plan our [GNU/]LinuxTag activities. There will a lot of discussion about GPLv3 there, which is something that we want to encourage and assist.

After this, I learned that FSFE had a 30 minute slot at the end of the day - but it was a surprise and we hadn't planned anything. Our quick improvisation was that Georg Greve (Germany), myself (Ireland), Henrik Sandklef (Sweden), Pablo Machón (Spain), and Reinhard Mueller (Austria) would each talk for 5 minutes about the work that we do.

We had 90 minutes to prepare for this together, and then it was onto the stage. I spoke about my work on EU legislation, assisting the free software community and movement in the UK & Ireland, and on my work on GPLv3.

That slot closed the event and so it was time to pack up the stall materials and arrange dinner plans. We'll all be back in the morning.