Legal Support Activities
Como organización no gubernamental sin ánimo de lucro, la Free Software Foundation Europe trabaja para crear un entendimiento general y un apoyo al Software Libre y los Estándares Abiertos. Las siguientes actividades son acciones concretas que realizamos en las áreas de concienciación pública, defensa de políticas y apoyo legal.
Desde su fundación en 2001, la FSFE ha estado trabajando cada día para promover el Software Libre en Europa y más allá. Con nuestras actividades concretas, basadas en los tres pilares de nuestro trabajo, nos centramos en proteger y ampliar los derechos de los usuarios. Algunas de nuestras acciones duran muchos años, otras tienen objetivos a corto plazo, pero todas forman parte de nuestra misión: capacitar a los usuarios el control de la tecnología.
Otra parte importante de nuestro trabajo consiste en el compromiso continuo y el trabajo de fondo. Estamos presentes en decenas de conferencias al año, apoyamos y mantenemos una excelente comunidad y la dotamos de recursos útiles. Además, somos un punto de contacto de referencia para todas las preguntas y consultas sobre la libertad del software, los Estándares Abiertos y los derechos de los usuarios. También proporcionamos recursos educativos básicos sobre cuestiones legales y de licencias de Software Libre.
Lea más sobre cuestiones legales del Software Libre y nuestro enfoque general en este área.
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The FSFE is running a project to make licensing easy for humans and machines alike. It solves a fundamental issue that Free Software licensing has at the very source: what license is a file licensed under, and who owns the copyright? REUSE provides easy recommendations in three steps that help users, developers and legal professionals.
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The FSFE is a partner organisation of NGI, a coalition of non-profit organisations from across Europe. Funded by the EC, it provides grants to work on new ideas and technologies that contribute to the establishment of the Next Generation Internet. The FSFE provides legal support for these projects.
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The FSFE’s Licence Questions mailing list is our group of volunteers dedicated to provide help with Free Software licences and compliance. If you need advice on what Free Software licence you should use, or if you want to know more about what rights you have over a piece of Free Software, you can contact us.
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The FSFE is part of these European consortium to promote and raise awareness about the importance of Free Software, Open Data, and Open Hardware among academia, business, industry, and innovation supporting organizations. As a big part of our work, we are promoting the REUSE specification as an important element for licensing compliance.
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The Legal Network is a neutral, non-partisan, group of experts involved in Free Software legal issues with currently several hundreds of participants from different legal systems, academic backgrounds and affiliations. The aim of the Legal Network is to promote discussion and foster better knowledge of the legal constructs that back Free Software.
Más Actividades Legales
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The Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) allows software projects to assign
copyrights to a named fiduciary for its effective management. This allows
developers to focus on development rather than spending time on legal
administration. While the FSFE is no longer accepting new projects under the
Fiduciary Programme, we continue to offer customisable versions of the FLA)
for your use.
We are working towards a world where software does what software
users want it to do. For this, software users must be able to
participate in the development and distribution of the software.
Software patents block this goal by adding legal and financial
risks to software development and distribution and by giving the
patent holders legal power to completely prohibit software
developers from using the patented ideas.
In 2001 the European Union started investigating Microsoft's dominant
position in the market for desktop operating systems. The FSFE represented
the interests of Free Software developer as a public interest organisation
who cannot be bought off. Thanks to the excellent work by all involved
parties, the case was won in all rulings up to the European Court of
Justice in 2012.
The Slovak company EURA faced fines of 5600 euros for not purchasing and use
Microsoft Windows operating system for submitting electronic tax reports.
The Slovak tax administration gave EURA the option to either buy and use
Microsoft Windows or face the fines. The FSFE assisted in this case
advocating for platform-neutral solutions for such procedures. Unfortunately,
the court ruled against Free Software and Open Standards, but we were able to
raise awareness about these wrongdoings in Slovakia and beyond.
Can a company modify GPL-licensed software on a third-party device? Router
manufacturer AVM accused Cybits of copyright and trademark infringement
for modifying the original router firmware, which is largely based on the
Linux kernel. Together with gpl-violations.org, we successfully convinced
the court that the terms of the GPL licence are binding: software under
this licence can be freely modified and installed, even if it is supplied
as part of the firmware of an embedded device.
Since the beginning of the standardisation process for Microsoft's Office
Open XML - OOXML (hereafter MS-OOXML), the FSFE has raised serious doubts
about whether MS-OOXML can be considered open. FSFE was the first to raise
the issue in the community, led the movement against the standardisation
of MS-OOXML, and has been closely following developments over the years.
El 29 de junio de 2007 se publicó la tercera versión de la General
Public License (GPL) de GNU, marcando el final de un proceso de consulta
pública de dieciocho meses. Durante este tiempo, la FSFE trabajó para
divulgar los cambios propuestos para la licencia, ayudar a la comunidad a
participar en el proceso de consulta pública y documentar la discusión
con objeto de hacer el tema lo más accesible posible.
The AGNULA project aimed to create a fully functional, completely Free
Software GNU/Linux distribution for professional audio users. Run by key
players in the audio community, and funded by the European Commission, the
FSFE was a partner in the project, taking care of the legal issues, its
long-term aspects, and making sure that the interests of the Free Software
community were heard.