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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? <a
      href="http://danielpocock.com/us-military-may-need-lumicall">Daniel
      Pocock explains why the US military might need the Free Software
    lumical</a>.</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? <a
      href="http://danielpocock.com/dynalogin-1.0.0-released">Daniel wrote
      about dynalogin</a> 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 />
<a href="https://planet.fsfe.org/en/rss20.xml">Fellowship Blog Aggregation</a><br />
<a href="/contact/community.html">Free Software Discussions</a> </p>

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