FSFE Newsletter March 2018
Erik Albers
Max MehlItaly at the forefront of European legislation for public code
With the FSFE's Public Money? Public Code! campaign not only do we demand that code paid for by the people should be available to the people. We also highlight good examples of public code so other decision makers can learn from it. One very good example is Article 68 and Article 69 of the "Codice Amministrazione Digitale", an Italian law requiring public administrations inside Italy to prefer internally made solutions and Free Software solutions over proprietary ones. In addition, these administrations have the duty to share the source code and documentation of any software developed with public money. These laws put Italy at the forefront of European legislation in favour of public code.
Unfortunately, so far the law lacks proper implementation. In that light, the FSFE's country team in Italy ran an Ask Your Candidates campaign in which they asked the political parties about their stand on Free Software and the implementation of the aforementioned Articles 68 and 69 after the national elections on March 4.
FSFE Italy received very positive replies and many parties took a favourable stand towards Free Software. Such a big consensus across these parties gives hope to open up a lot of possibilities for progress towards the use of Free Software at the state level in Italy and a better implementation of Articles 68 and 69 of the "Codice Amministrazione Digitale". As a match to this, the team "Developers Italia", who are in charge of further implementation of the Articles 68 and 69, sent out their love for Free Software on I love Free Software day.
Read our detailed IloveFS report
As promised in the last newsletter, we now have a detailed report about our IloveFS campaign in 2018. In the report, you will not only read about some highlights that happened for this year's IloveFS. Thanks to our current intern Jan, we also have an analysis and visualisation of 439 'I Love Free Software' messsages containing the #IloveFS hashtag. The scraper Jan used for his analysis is written in GNU R and published as Free Software.
While every year we are happy to see so many people celebrating I love Free Software day, we also encourage you to express your Free Software love every day :)
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What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
- Paul Boddie reflects on the hobbyism and volunteerism attitude in many Free Software projects and what this means for the valuation of the actual work that is done, examining Python language development as an example.
- Isabel Drost Fromm argues against people acting as mediators as the only interface between their employer and a Free Software project.
- Carmen Bianca Bakker reflects on the recently updated FreeBSD Code of Conduct, examines the included dangers of positive discrimination, and states how a non-biased, welcoming Code of Conduct can indeed help dogs and cats to live happily ever after.
- Daniel Pocock reflects on the newly-introduced SwissID, and its potential dangers to privacy and democratic referendums.
- Erik Albers asked our community on multiple channels to let the FSFE know about upcoming Free Software events in 2018 that are of interest to the FSFE community. Thanks to our current intern Vincent they all ended up in the FSFE's wiki calendar so our teams and community can use them to organise their attendance.
- Björn Schießle, the FSFE's country coordinator Germany, gave a talk about software freedom in the cloud at "Chemnitzer Linuxtage" in Chemnitz, Germany.
- Erik Albers was giving a talk about Public Money? Public Code! at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain.
- The new born local FSFE group in Madrid had its first meeting on February 22 and March 3.
- The FSFE has been present with a booth at "Chemnitzer Linuxtage" in Chemnitz (Germany), at T3chfest in Madrid (Spain), and at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia (Spain).
Get Active
If you have not done so yet, let us know your favorite Free Software event that you think is or should be in interest for the FSFE community to set up a booth at or participate in with a talk or workshop. The simplest way to do so is by sending a mail to contact@fsfe.org with the subject "Free Software event 2018". Please state what the event is about, how many participants are expected, and the main language used. Before informing us, please check if we do not already have it in our list.
If you are visiting any other events regularly or soon, be it a big conference or a local meet-up, equip yourself with some FSFE promotion material that you can order at no charge.
Contribute to our newsletter
If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks to our community, all the volunteers, supporters and donors who make our work possible. And thanks to our translators, who enable you to read this newsletter in your mother tongue.
Your editors,
Erik Albers and Max Mehl
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