FSFE Newsletter May 2018
Erik AlbersLLW2018: The FSFE brings together top legal experts to debate about legal and licensing issues around Free Software
Following a more than a decade long tradition, the FSFE once again led its annual Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) in Barcelona, Spain, as a meeting point for world-leading legal experts to debate over issues and best practices surrounding Free Software licences. This year we decided to bring the event back to its roots and to emphasise the "Workshop" part in its original title. Our 3-day conference attracted around 120 legal experts and came with an unprecedented amount of parallel tracks and interactive sessions designed to dive into the most contentious topics in the legal world of Free Software.
Some of the topics covered during the conference included an update on how to build a successful legal defense strategy against a copyright troll, recommendations on how to tackle challenges of compliance in container images, as well as an overview of what decades of Free Software licensing can teach us in data sharing. A more detailed report of this important event is to come during the next weeks.
The FSFE community as a case study
Since more than 15 years, the FSFE is an enduring non-profit organisation with a distributed network of people, who contribute their time and effort into our common mission to empower users to control technology. That is why Giacomo Poderi chose the FSFE community as one of his cases for his research in the “Infrastructuring SuStainable Playbour“ (ISSP) project. This project investigates the sustainability of collaborative spaces, as commons, and it focuses on participants’ continuous contribution to the maintenance and development of such ‘places’.
If you are contributing or contributed in the past to the FSFE's mission and you feel fine with being interviewed, please get in touch with Giacomo Poderi. No automated data gathering is involved in this research and no sensitive data are expected to be collected. Furthermore, anonymity of participants will be preserved in any dissemination activity related to this research.
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What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
- While you better not start using Facebook in the first place, currently many people decide to move away from Facebook. Sebastian Schauenburg writes about his own experience of "Disconnecting from Facebook".
- Evaggelos Balaskas blogs about USBGuard and other measurements to protect your system from the harmful attach of an unknown USB device.
- Daniel Pocock runs a crowdfunding campaign to help run a ham radio station at OSCAL 2018 and blogs about initial problems with GoFundMe beforehand.
- Erik Albers was on a panel about "The Sustainable Side of Technology", organized by GreenBuzz in Betahaus in Berlin, Germany.
- Matthias Kirschner gave a talk at the Internet policy forum of the social-democratic party in Germany in Berlin, Germany.
- The FSFE has been present with a booth at the OpenTechSummit and at Netzfest in Berlin (Germany) and Corso Leopold in Munich (Germany)
Get Active
We have been running a call for participation for the FSFE track during the Libre Software Meeting 2018 and the FSFE's community meeting from July 7 to 9 in Strasbourg, France. Thanks to numerous submissions we still need to set the last details of the agenda, but you can already get a first glance of our track as well as the most important information about accommodation and organisation on our wiki-page.
If you like to join the Libre Software Meeting and our community meeting be quick to organise your trip and book a suitable hotel. We expect many people to attend the event, while Strasbourg attracts a lot of visitors during the summer weekends in general.
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 editor,
Erik Albers
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