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News Archive for 2007
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21 December 2007
"Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to
implement free and open industry standards," is the message of a
letter by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to European
Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. To help achieve this goal, FSFE
offered its support for a possible antitrust investigation based on
the complaint of Opera Software against Microsoft. The complaint was
based on anti-competitive behaviour in the web browser market.
20 December 2007
One case is over and interoperability won. The European Court made
clear that interoperability information should not be kept secret and
the agreement shows that Microsoft saw no way to continue its
obstruction of interoperability in this area. This establishes a
standard which everyone will have to meet from now on.
09 November 2007
"Vendor lock-in has become the primary problem for IT decisions in
general and Free Software adoption in particular. It distorts the market
and denies Free Software solutions equal competition on the merits. The
problem has been that many lock-ins are invisible, for example reliance
on proprietary protocols or needing to use certain document
formats. Certified Open makes that lock-in visible and allows users to
measure their dependency."
17 September 2007
"Microsoft can consider itself above the law no longer," says Georg
Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
"Through tactics that successfully derailed antitrust processes in
other parts of the world, including the United States, Microsoft has
managed to postpone this day for almost a decade. But thanks to the
perseverance and excellent work of the European Commission, these
tactics have now failed in Europe."
27 July 2007
The terms of the GNU GPL licence have been confirmed as binding
once again, with a German court ruling that Skype was failing
to uphold its obligations as a distributor. FSFE wants to help
other vendors understand their GNU GPL obligations.
16 July 2007
FSFE Guest Commentary on Heise.de: "Conversion between Microsoft's
Office OpenXML (MS-OOXML) and the vendor-independent Open Document
Format (ODF) has been proposed by Microsoft and its associates as a
solution to the problems caused by Microsoft's efforts to push a
format into the market that conflicts with the existing Open
Standard. [...] If these converters were actually able to do what they
promise to do, they would be unnecessary."
11 July 2007
Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has always helped the community
through providing pro bono advice, and through this has discovered
that businesses often require additional personal assistance. For
this reason, FSFE is offering businesses a chance to get individual
consultancy regarding Free Software issues at its Zurich, Switzerland
office.
11 July 2007
Featured article by Georg Greve and Joachim Jakobs
about the need for Open Standards in archival, and why using MS-OOXML risks future data loss:
"Digital information could potentially be stored without loss of quality for a very long time to come.
But without knowledge about the encoding, our documents will become a meaningless series of ones and zeroes to future generations, just like cave paintings are too often meaningless bits of colour on stone to us."
05 July 2007
Version 3 of the GNU GPL has been released, after eighteen months of
public consultation and discussion. Version 3 provides better
internationalisation, more protection against software patents, and
does a better job of ensuring that Free Software users can install
modified software on their computers.
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30 June 2007
Six years after its start in 2001, the Free Software Foundation Europe
(FSFE) has now grown into an organisation of 9 employees equalling 6.7
full-time staff plus two interns. The European Core Team is fast
approaching 30 people and there are active people in more than nine
European countries. This report will try to summarise some of the key
milestones of the past two years of activity.
26 June 2007
The following six questions relate to the application of the
ECMA/MS-OOXML format to be accepted as an IEC/ISO
standard. Unless a national standardisation body has conclusive
answers to all of them, it should vote no in IEC/ISO and request
that Microsoft incorporate its work on MS-OOXML into ISO/IEC
26300:2006 (Open Document Format).
18 May 2007
In an attempt to inspire fear, uncertainty and doubt in the hearts of
the financial world, Microsoft alledged massive patent infringement by
Free Software in a recent Fortune article.
23 April 2007
The FSFE criticises the proposed "second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement
Directive" (IPRED2) for sweeping criminalisation across various areas of law
and loosely described areas of activity, including for 'attempting, aiding or
abetting and inciting.' The proposed text criminalises these acts for
infringement of many dissimilar laws including copyright, trademark, and
patents.
17 April 2007
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is committed to working
with lawyers throughout Europe to maximise the legal security of Free
Software and is aware that as the community matures it is important to
be able to locate professional legal advice. For this reason FSFE has
introduced a new policy for recommending legal experts in individual
countries.
24 February 2007
"The Free Software community is built on the principle of cooperation
of many very different parts. The Free Software Foundation Europe
(FSFE) works exclusively for the benefit of the entire community,
including the companies that make use of Free Software," explains
Georg Greve, president of FSFE. "We do this work gladly and with
great enthusiasm and we always remember that to a large extent this
work is made possible by those who work with us and support us, in
particular the many Fellows of FSFE."
01 February 2007
Today FSFE has released the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) and the Creative
Commons Attribution/Share-alike (CC by-sa) licence. The FLA is a
copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to bundle their
copyright in a single organisation or person. It enables projects to
ensure their legal maintainability and can be used to either assign
copyright to FSFE's Fiduciary Program or to assign the rights to
another organisation set up by the project team itself.
30 January 2007
FSFE considers this a unique opportunity: With the release of Vista,
users will need to upgrade to a new operating system that will feel
different and require some time to get used to its functionality. The
same is true for any modern GNU/Linux distribution. It is about the
same investment in effort, but it will give you control over your own
data.
23 January 2007
The OpenSwarm Project will be protected by FSFE's Freedom Task Force
(FTF). Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, explains "The Freedom Task
Force is here to help strengthen the legal foundation of the Free
Software eco-system. The Fiduciary licence Agreement is part of this.
It provides a clear way for projects to consolidate their copyright.
In the case of OpenSwarm, FSFE is acting a legal guardian for the
project and ensuring that the developers can focus on maturing an
exciting development platform."
09 January 2007
In this talk, Richard Stallman explains why Free Software is
defined the way it is, the technical and political choices that
have gotten the Free Software movement to where it is today, and
what we have to do to prepare for what's ahead. With more than
20 years of practice, Stallman also entertains while telling the
story.
This transription work was undertaken by FSFE due
to the very positive feedback from the transcripts about GPLv3.