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								  <title>FSFE Newsletter - March 2013</title>

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								<h1>FSFE Newsletter - March 2013</h1>


								<h2>Brussels flooded with Free Software activists</h2>


								<p>From February 1st to February 3rd thousands of people went to Brussels to

								participate in FOSDEM -- the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European

								Meeting.  At FOSDEM you have the opportunity to meet developers and

								contributors from nearly all major Free Software projects. FSFE is always there

								to talk with people about ongoing developments and the needs and contributions

								in the Free Software community. So it is a good place to exchange information,

								talk with very interesting people, plan future activities, and meet all the

								people you would usually just have e-mail contact with.</p>


								<p>As in previous years,  FSFE was present with a booth, answering questions

								about current political topics and activities, distributing information material and – what every hacker needs – cool t-shirts. Fellow <a

								  href="http://creative-destruction.me/2013/02/02/fosdem13-community-legal-devrooms">Mirko

								  Böhm has written a summary about FOSDEM</a>, including tips on communication

								for Free Software groups and projects, if we should embrace app stores and how

								to share a trademark. Isabel Drost has <a href="http://blog.isabel-drost.de/index.php/archives/tag/fosdem">documented FOSDEM in 9 blog posts</a>: from

								<a href="http://blog.isabel-drost.de/index.php/archives/460/fosdem-2013-01">her

								  arrival with spider robots</a>, about <a

								  href="http://blog.isabel-drost.de/index.php/archives/461/trademarks-and-oss">Trademarks

								  and Free Software</a>, or <a

								  href="http://blog.isabel-drost.de/index.php/archives/463/afero-gpl-panel-discussion-fosdem-04">the

								  panel discussion about GNU APL</a>.</p>


								<p>We were also present with several talks: For example our Finnish team

								coordinator <a

								  href="https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/speaker/otto_kekalainen/">Otto

								  Kekäläinen</a> gave a talk about "Fixing public procurement", our

								vice-president Henrik Sandklef gave a <a

								  href="http://sandklef.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/searduino-fosdem-new-gui-simulator-and-some-thoughts-on-java/">talk

								  about Searduino</a>, and Erik Albers presented our <a

								  href="/activities/android/android.html">Free Your Android campaign</a> (<a

								  href="http://video.fosdem.org/2013/lightningtalks/Phone_liberation_parties.webm">recording

								  available (webm)</a>.</p>


								<p>As part of the FYA campaign, Several Fellows also participated in a <a

								  href="http://epfsug.eu/content/free-your-android-fsfe">meeting at the

								  European Parliament on Friday</a>. It was organised by Alexander Alvaro,

								Vice-President of the European Parliament (EP), together with the <a

								  href="http://epfsug.eu/">European Parliament Free Software User Group

								  (EPFSUG)</a>. He wanted his EP colleagues to learn how to regain control of

								their data and how to install a free operating system and Free Software on

								their Android devices.</p>


								<p>Just three weeks later, we were shocked to hear that Mr Alvaro had a car

								accident and is still in hospital with serious injuries. FSFE wishes him a fast

								and full recovery.</p>


								<h2>Why we love Free Software</h2>


								<p><a href="/news/2013/news-20130212-01.html">A lot of people followed our

								  call</a> to participate in the I love Free Software activity. The result –

								which has been <a href="/news/2013/news-20130221-01.html">summarised in a

								  report</a> by FSFE's new interns Lucile Falgueyrac and Stepan Stehlicek – was

								a lot of e-mails, blog posts, pictures and a comic strip. E.g., Fellow Mirko

								Böhm explains why he loves Free Software:</p>


								<blockquote><p>The benefits of Free Software go beyond the individual

								  contributors and the communities they form. The four freedoms laid out as the

								  foundations of Free Software are a fanfare to the ability to exercise one’s

								  free will, to freely collaborate by helping your neighbors, to achieve

								  independence from directions other people have thought up for us. The effects

								  can be seen all around us – when teaching material for schools is developed

								  collaboratively and freely shared, when government data is opened up to

								  improve the transparency of the political process, when the technical

								  foundations of the internet and the operating systems running modern

								  technology become a common good, and in many other places. People start to

								  expect similar freedoms they learned to get used to in software when engaging

								  in society. And more participation is always better.</p></blockquote>


								<!-- Hannes asked to take this out for the moment

								<h2>Alpha release of new PDFreaders</h2>


								<p>Erich Turnwald-Kurtz was the lucky winner of our PDFreaders lottery. He won

								a FSFE t-shirt and a mug, plus self made cookies from our our ex-intern and now

								volunteer Ana Galan. Thanks to him and the other donors we received €1,332 to

								update pdfreaders.org. Paul Hänsch has put the <a

								  href="http://alpha.pdfr.plutonium.fsfeurope.org/index/">development version

								  of pdfreaders.org online</a>. This site is supposed to automatically

								recognise the visitor's operating system and browser, and suggest a specific

								Free Software PDF reader for the operating system, preferably one which comes

								with a plugin for the browser. The matching is based on User-Agent-String of

								the browser, there is no Java Script involved (this was also a request by the

								German agency for IT security). Please report anything you find, even the

								obvious things on our <a href="https://trac.fsfe.org">bug tracker</a> under the

								component: PDFreaders.org.</p>

								-->


								<h2>Something completely different</h2>


								<ul>


								  <li>Our DFD team published a <a

								    href="https://download.fsfe.org/campaigns/dfd/youtube-howto-english-854x480.webm">video

								    tutorial</a>, which explains how to watch Youtube videos using HTML5. Do

								  not miss this month's "get-active" item below, which is also about Document

								  Freedom Day.</li>


								  <li>We have received a report about a <a

								    href="https://wiki.fsfe.org/WindowsTaxRefund/Croatia">successful case of Windows

								    tax refund in Croatia</a>. One has to apply for the refund within 30

								  days of a purchase of an ASUS product and fill out a form in order to receive

								  €42 refund for Microsoft Windows 8 OEM.</li>


								  <li>LWN writes about <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/536126">trademarks and

								    their limits</a>, the idea behind trademarks, about how effective this

								  protection is, and gives examples of bad behaviour; e.g., offering Free

								  Software with unwanted toolbars and adware.</li>


								  <li>In FSFE we receive a lot of license questions, but we have not yet

								  evaluated how many we receive through country teams, our legal teams, or over

								  the phone. <a

								    href="http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-licensing-team-what-we-did-in-2012-why-it-matters-for-2013">Our sister organisation FSF reports</a>

								  that they have responded to and resolved over 400 reports of suspected

								  license violations and over 600 general licensing and compliance

								  questions.</li>


								  <li>Your editor has written an article for the German news site Heise titled

								  <a

								    href="http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Die-Woche-Politik-und-Freie-Software-1794251.html">"Politics

								    and Free Software"</a>. The article covers his experience from the

								  parliament working group on interoperability, standards, and Free

								  Software.</li>


								  <li>Guido Arnold <a

								    href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/guido/2013/02/free-software-in-education-news-january-2013-2/">has

								    published the January update about Free Software in education</a>, covering

								  news from the community and the government as well as upcoming events.</li>


								  <li>Mirko gave a talk at Embedded World 2013 about <a

								    href="http://creative-destruction.me/2013/02/26/defensive-publications-at-embedded-world-2013/">defensive

								    publications</a>.</li>


								  <li>Besides many other positive news from Joinup about Free Software in the

								  public administration: Member of the European Parliament <a

								    href="http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/mep-authorities-should-include-freedoms-when-deciding-software">Amelia

								    Andersdotter wants public administrations to consider software freedom</a>

								  as one of the reasons to select new ICT solutions, and the <a

								    href="http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/bolzano-automates-testing-e-government-services-free-software-systems">city of Bolzano has

								    automated testing of e-government services on Free Software

								    systems</a>.</li>


								  <li>Fellow Jelle Hermsen asked for blog aggregation for our Dutch Fellows,

								  and <a href="https://planet.fsfe.org/nl/">now it is up and running</a>.</li>


								  <li>From the <a href="https://planet.fsfe.org">planet aggregation</a>: </li>


								  <ul>


								    <li>Anna Morris, who created the DFD video mentioned above, wrote about <a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/anna.morris/2013/02/18/guake-a-great-command-line-tool-for-dyslexics-and-beginners-in-fedora-with-autostart/">

								      Guake: a command-line tool for "dyslexics and beginners"</a>.</li>


								    <li>You wonder why we published the DFD as ".webm"? <a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/pb/?page_id=20">Peter Bubestinger wrote a summary article</a>

								    about different video formats from a Free Software perspective, explaining

								    that digital video consists of video codec, audio codec, and container

								    format. He explains the different codecs, and why some videos do not work

								    out of the box on a Free Software Distribution.</li>


								    <li>Beside this, Peter also wrote about <a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/pb/?p=41">Tears of Steel, a movie made with Free

								      Software</a>.</li>


								    <li>From Steel to Stealth: What could the Americans and British do to put

								    the stealth back into stealth bomber? Daniel

								      Pocock explains why the US military might need the Free Software

								    lumical.</li>


								    <li><a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/marklindhout/2013/02/use-rsync-to-delete-remote-folders/">Mark Lindhout described

								      how to use RSYNC to delete remote folders</a> and after inspiration from

								    the last Fellowship meeting in Berlin he also wrote about <a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/marklindhout/2013/02/need-to-play-high-fidelity-white-noise-listen-to-devurandom-on-osx/">

								      why and how to play high-fidelity white noise</a>.</li>


								    <li>Interested in a distributed solution for one-time-password

								    authentication on GNU/Linux operating systems? Daniel wrote       about dynalogin which is providing this.</li>


								    <li><a

								      href="https://blogs.fsfe.org/thomaslocke/2013/02/10/using-the-ada-web-server-aws-part-1">Thomas Løcke

								      describes how to use the Ada Web Server</a> and,</li>


								    <li><a

								      href="http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/inspiration-for-fbp-ui/">Henri Bergius is thinking about

								      the flow-based programming user interface</a>.</li>


								  </ul>


								</ul>


								<h2>Get active: Organise an event for Document Freedom Day 2013</h2>


								<p>Help us to introduce more people to Open Standards – participate in <a

								  href="http://documentfreedom.org">Document Freedom Day 2013</a> on March

								27th! Local teams can now <a

								  href="http://www.documentfreedom.org/registerevent.html">promote their

								  events</a> on DocumentFreedom.org, and have them marked on the <a

								  href="http://www.documentfreedom.org/events/events.html">global campaign

								  map</a>.</p>


								<p>In 2012 groups of volunteers ran 54 events in 23 different countries. If you

								want to get some inspiration for your event, take a look at our <a

								  href="http://www.documentfreedom.org/getinvolved.html">activity packages</a>

								or the <a

								  href="http://www.documentfreedom.org/news/2012/news-20120403-01.html">DFD

								  report from 2012</a>. Help us to make this year's DFD the most successful

								yet!</p>


								<p>Thanks to all the <a href="https://my.fsfe.org/donate">Fellows</a> and

								<a href="donate/thankgnus.html">donors</a> who enable our work,<br/>

								<a href="/about/people/kirschner">Matthias Kirschner </a> - <a href="/">FSFE</a></p>


								<p>-- <br />

								<a href="/index.html">Free Software Foundation Europe</a><br />

								<a href="/news/news.rss">FSFE News</a><br />

								<a href="/events/events.rss">Upcoming FSFE Events</a><br />

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