FSFE Newsletter - January 2011
Robots, Football, and Education
Their mission is to bring Free Software into schools and universities. Their new task is to gather information about their stakeholders, and create targeted leaflets. And I am sure the favourite colour of the coordinators Thomas Jensch and Guido Arnold is Fellowship green. That's our education team.
Can robots help with that? We think they can. Our education team had a first meeting to get trained in giving programming workshops using freedroidz robots. We want to teach pupils how to program, show them that it's good to share and co-operate, and explain Free Software to their teachers, parents, and politicians.
And what about football? Regular readers might remember that Guido Arnold is running a parallel tournament to the football championship in Europe 2012 where the discipline is Free Software usage in government. So every time there is a football match, Guido starts a Free Software match between them, while a huge part is of course the government's education policy. Read Guido's blog to find out why Russia is a hot candidate for the European champion, but why we need more information on Eastern European countries.
Public institutions - hares or snails?
Already, 203 public institutions have removed advertisements for proprietary PDF readers from their websites. Particularly outstanding were the responses from Croatia, Russia and Slovenia. In Croatia all except one reported institution deleted the advertisement. Half of those contacted in Russia and Slovenia fulfilled FSFE's request. Amongst the public institutions are ministries, parliaments, law enforcement agencies, local governments, and other administrations.
With our PDFreaders campaign we will continue to follow-up with the reported institutions and you can still encourage friends to sign the corresponding petition.
Something completely different
- You think your old C64 was slow? Working on the United Nations level will change your mind. Karsten Gerloff wrote an article about FSFE's UN work: "WIPO CDIP/6: Moving the glacier".
- Open Standards in Europe: The European Commission published the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). We at FSFE have been working on this document for a long time. Read our press release and an article by Karsten assessing the new EIF.
- Current developments at Nokia, the transformative power of Free Software, and the potential dangers posed by the use of Free Software by large organisations. Those are the topics of the current Fellowship interview with Alexander Kahl, Fedora packager, Lisp, JavaScript and Perl programmer, and active FSFE volunteer.
- While Torsten Grote gave a radio interview (German) about risks of cloud computing and chances of distributed Free Software, Björn Schiessle writes about how he wants to install distributed software at home.
Get active: Help with Euro 2012 championship
Help us gathering information about government's Free Software usage. This information helps us to evaluate the current situation and of course it will decide who will be the European Free Software champion in 2012. Add the information on our website before March 25 and it will influence the next matches, add information continuously and it will help Free Software activists all over the world.
Happy GNU Year,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
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