Slashdot Mirror

FSFE Fellow writes "The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems. FSFE president Georg Greve says: 'Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.'"

An anonymous reader sends us to LinuxElectrons.com for an announcement from the Free Software Foundation Europe, in the form of a letter (PDF) sent to the European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. FSFE offers to support a possible EU antitrust investigation of Microsoft, declaring that "Microsoft should be required openly, fully and faithfully to implement free and open industry standards." Opera Software issued a complaint to the Competition Commissioner based on anti-competitive behavior in the web browser market. FSFE president Georg Greve writes in the letter, "Although Opera Software does not produce Free Software, we largely share their assessment and concerns regarding the present situation in the Internet browser market."

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "A transcript is now online of a talk Richard Stallman gave in Brussels earlier this week about the discussion draft 3 of GPLv3. Among other things, he explained how it will address the Novell-MS deal, from Novell's point of view and from Microsoft's, and he explained how the tivoisation clause was narrowed to make it more acceptable in the hope that it will be used by more people. After the talk he also gave an interview, and yesterday, draft 2 of LGPLv3 was released."

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The first recorded talk by Richard Stallman on free software was in 1986, so I've picked from the 2006 recordings and have made a transcript of a recent talk: The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom. Those two are the only transcripts of his general free software talk. Others that exist are on specific topics such as patents, GPLv3, copyright, etc. For those who've been reading Slashdot during the gradual evolution of Stallman's pronouncements, it's interesting to see what has changed over 20 years."

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The 5th international GPLv3 conference was held in Tokyo last week. I've made and published a transcript of Stallman's talk where he described the latest on what GPLv3 will do about the MS/Novell deal, Treacherous Computing, patents, Tivo, and the other changes to the licence. While I was at it, I made a transcript of my talk from the next day where I tried to fill in some info that Richard didn't mention."

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "The 5th international GPLv3 conference was held in Tokyo last week. I've made and published a transcript of Stallman's talk where he described the latest on what GPLv3 will do about the MS/Novell deal, Treacherous Computing, patents, Tivo, and the other changes to the licence. While I was at it, I made a transcript of my talk from the next day where I tried to fill in some info that Richard didn't mention."

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "When Free Software Foundation Europe organised the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, they recorded the whole two days on video, and have now put online the video and audio recordings. There's also a transcript of Richard Stallman's presentation, and of Eben Moglen's presentation, both of which include the Q&A sessions. The videos are all available by BitTorrent, so a slashdotting should be okay. Enjoy!"

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "When Free Software Foundation Europe organised the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, they recorded the whole two days on video, and have now put online the video and audio recordings. There's also a transcript of Richard Stallman's presentation, and of Eben Moglen's presentation, both of which include the Q&A sessions. The videos are all available by BitTorrent, so a slashdotting should be okay. Enjoy!"

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "When Free Software Foundation Europe organised the recent GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, they recorded the whole two days on video, and have now put online the video and audio recordings. There's also a transcript of Richard Stallman's presentation, and of Eben Moglen's presentation, both of which include the Q&A sessions. The videos are all available by BitTorrent, so a slashdotting should be okay. Enjoy!"

wikinerd writes "FSFE, the European branch of Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation announced that it was granted observer status in WIPO, the international organisation which influences nationwide copyright laws."

Elektroschock writes "LWN has coverage of a GPL dispute settled in a constructive manner. Allnet GmbH, German manufacturer and distributor of networking equipment, including switches, routers, NICs and wireless adapters, infringed the GNU Public License of netfilter/iptables. As part of the settlement Allnet GmbH will donate money to tax-exempt not-for-profit organizations, i.e. FSF Europe and FFII. Both organisations lobby for better copyright and patent legislation in Europe."

balor writes "January 5th 2004, Irish Free Software Organisation (IFSO) is launched. Since June 2003, members of the fsfe-ie mailing list have been collaborating on issues such as software patents, and the European Copyright Directive. With Ireland holding the presidency of the EU for the next six months, political lobbying in Ireland will be of increased importance. The fate of the software patentability directive is still undecided, and we now also have the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive to deal with. In the coming months, we also hope to work on spreading education and adoption of Free Software in Ireland. By no coincidence, today is also the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the GNU project."

Zocalo sent us a story running at FSF Europe talking about SourceForge's Drifting. Talks about the fact that they are releasing a closed-source version of the code commercially and various copyright related things. Obviously VA owns both SF and Slashdot so I'm skewed, but my personal opinion is that VA is doing what they need to do to make a buck while still providing the SourceForge.net website to the Open Source community. And I think their decision to sell a closed-source proprietary version of the code would be hypocritical, except that they aren't a 100% open-source company any more. And *that* is the part that makes me the most sad.

Mr. Adequate writes: "The European Patent Office finished its diplomatic conference in Munich today. According to the press release, the non-patentability of software will remain unchanged for another year. Then the fun starts again. In the meantime, European Slashdotters could do worse than to voice their concerns to their EU representatives, sign the petition, and of course support the fledgling FSF Europe." The process certainly didn't rule out software patents, just said they're still thinking about it.

senfman writes "The German News Service Heise Onilne writes in this article, that the Free Software Foundation Europe was founded. The four founding members are Germans who look for people in other european countries to support them. The FSF Europe is going to cooperate with Richard M. Stallman to make sure that there are no differences between this institutions." Excellent.