Issues around standardisation, 21st May 2008

In Amsterdam, FSFE's Freedom Task Force hosted the first European Legal and Licensing Workshop, leading to broad agreement between many European stakeholders on methods of improving legal infrastructure for Free Software in Europe. In Brazil, the 9th FISL conference provided a forum for various discussion about the adoption and evolution of free technologies.

The Fellowship and FSFE volunteers were also active. The Fellows in Berlin had a booth at a distribution release party and the Italian volunteers worked on building the structure to ensure long-term sustainability for their team.

Please consider how you can contribute to our movement. You can visit http://fsfeurope.org/contribute for suggestions of ways to get involved.

Shane, FSFE Zurich Office

1. FTF workshop leads to broad agreement on European licensing infrastructure
2. Lack of quality in standardisation a serious problem
3. Licensing as a strategic imperative, speech at FISL
4. Fellowship Group at Ubuntu Release Party in Berlin
5. Italian team: new mailing list and renewed blog

1. FTF workshop leads to broad agreement on European licensing infrastructure

The recent European Legal and Licensing Workshop hosted by FSFE's Freedom Task Force lead to productive discussions and broad agreement on important focus areas in Free Software licensing between commercial and non-commercial stakeholders. The event took place in Amsterdam during early April and was attended to capacity. Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, states that "this marks an example of the growing maturity of Free Software in Europe. We have a great deal to do to ensure strong infrastructure to support the community, but as this workshop showed, the will and ability to create the infrastructure is present in all stakeholders." Documentation from the workshop will be released to the public shortly.

2. Lack of quality in standardisation a serious problem

"FSFE published its 'Six questions to national standardisation bodies' before the September 2nd vote last year. [1] Considering the statements about progress made on MS-OOXML, one would have hoped that at least one of these questions enjoyed a satisfactory response," states FSFE's German Deputy country coordinator Matthias Kirschner. He continues: "Unfortunately that is not the case. Issues like the 'Converter Hoax' [2] and the 'Questions on Open Formats' [3] are still equally valid. As the 'Deprecated before use' [4] and 'Interoperability woes with OOXML' [5] documents demonstrate, MS-OOXML interoperability is severely limited in comparison to Open Standards. In addition to these issues, there are the legal concerns that were raised by various parties. [6]"

FSFE vice-president Jonas Öberg states: "Governments have to start asking themselves what the ISO seal of approval really means. As demonstrated by the MPEG standards, it never meant that something qualifies as a meaningful 'Open Standard.'"

1. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions
2. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-converter-hoax
3. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-questions-for-ms
4. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies
5. http://fsfeurope.org/documents/msooxml-interoperability
6. http://www.fsfla.org/svnwiki/stdlib/offdoc/mision

3. Licensing as a strategic imperative, speech at FISL

Shane Coughlan, FSFE's Freedom Task Force Coordinator, delivered a speech on the strategic importance of Free Software licensing at this years FISL event in Porte Alegre, Brazil. FISL has grown to be perhaps the largest Free Software event in the world. This year it was attended by 7,000 people and notable speakers included Jon 'Maddog' Hall, Theodore Ts'o from the Linux Foundation and Mitchell Baker from Mozilla Corporation. Well known European faces like Knut Yrvin from Trolltech and Bram Moolenaar, the creator of VIM, were also present.

4. Fellowship Group at Ubuntu Release Party in Berlin

The Berlin Fellowship Group attended the "Hardy Heron" release event in Berlin's cbase and featured a talk from Fellow Torsten Grote about Gobuntu -- which aims to be a complete free (as in free speech) GNU/Linux operating system -- and the importance of Free Software in general. The group also had a booth there which attracted many interested visitors who were very eager to learn about Free Software. While Ubuntu is not entirely Free Software, it has helped a lot to make Free Software accessible to many people. The Berlin Fellowship wanted to build on this and foster discussion about our goal of having 100% Free Software available to everyone.

If you would like to join in the fun, please note that the Berlin Fellowship meets every second Thursday in the month at the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystr. 48 in 10117 Berlin at 19:30 pm.

5. Italian team: new mailing list and renewed blog

The Italian team of the FSFE has just launched a new public discussion mailing list about Free Software and FSFE activities in Italy. All Italian fellows, volunteers and interested people are invited to join us and come up with ideas, proposals and any kind of questions. You can subscribe to the new fsfe-it@ list at: https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-it

Also, Gnuvox (http://www.gnuvox.info), the blog on Free Software and Free Culture maintained by the Italian team, has just been renewed thanks to the TIS Free Software Center in Bolzano. We have some interesting plans for the future, and we invite all italian Fellows and bloggers to follow Gnuvox , submit comments and new posts too: you can contact the editorial team at: pr-it(at)fsfeurope.org