FSFE President Urges Community To Strengthen Open Source As a Brand 152

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday June 05, 2009 @01:31PM from the someone-better-tackle-stallman dept.

Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."

Linux Foundation Asks Who Says "I'm Linux" Best 459

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @02:32PM from the creepy's-definitely-the-way-to-go dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Everyone has seen Apple's clever 'I'm a Mac' ads, and Microsoft's attempted responses, first with Jerry Seinfeld, and next with 'I'm a PC.' The Linux Foundation tries to fire back with its community-generated 'We're Linux' video contest: all of the eligible videos have now been submitted and are ready to be voted on. Thankfully, the quality of Linux is much higher than the quality of some of these entries: entries range from the hilarious but inappropriate, to the well-made but creepy, to the 'I'm sure it sounded good in your head.' Thankfully, there are one or two that could actually be real commercials."

Submission + - FSFE launches Free PDF Readers campaign

Submitted by

FSFE Fellow

on Monday February 02, 2009 @04:25AM

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.

"Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers," says FSFE president Georg Greve. "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.""

Comment Re:Supporting the freedom for my hardware to not w (Score 1) 405

by pinky0x51 on Sunday November 30, 2008 @11:50AM (#25933481) Attached to: Proprietary Blobs and the Pursuit of a Free Kernel

>Once again, the FSF takes a noble goal to a loony extreme.

As far as i understand FSF nothing has changed. Their position was always that everyone should have the same freedom related to software (files of functional work) on your computer.
So the shift doesn't come from the FSF but from the hardware manufactures. At that point of time where they pull the firmware out of the hardware and put it into a file of my computer the same qestion arrises as for any other software: Why should one person have more power over this file on my computer than i?
As i understand it the position of the FSF was always "We are all in the same boat". So everyone should be able to change it or nobody. Now that the firmware is just a file on my harddisk, just a pice of software, why should the right person (employee of the right company) be able to modify it and i'm not? If you allow this compromise for firmware you have to answer the question "and why don't make the same compromise for a driver, or for a binary which does foo?". At the end it is all the same. It is a file on my computer which does some functional work and in the eyes of the FSF this should alway bee free softwar so that everyone has the same freedom and noone has power over you and your computing.

Proprietary Blobs and the Pursuit of a Free Kernel 405

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 28, 2008 @10:09PM from the free-as-in-beerspeech dept.

jammag writes "Ever since the GNewSense team pointed out that the Linux kernel contains proprietary firmware blobs, the question of whether a given distro is truly free software has gotten messier, notes Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. The FSF changed the definition of a free distribution, and a search for how to respond to this new definition is now well underway. Who wins and what solutions are implemented could have a major effect on the future of free and open source software. Debian has its own solution (by allowing users to choose their download), as do Ubuntu and Fedora (they include the offending firmware by default but make it possible to remove it). Meanwhile, the debate over firmware rages on. What resolves this issue?"

Answers from Harald Welte, "VIA's Open Source Representative" 65

Posted by Roblimo on Tuesday September 16, 2008 @12:00PM from the taking-time-out-from-his-unbelievably-hectic-schedule dept.

Earlier this month you asked Harald about VIA's open source strategy and his work with gpl-violations.org. Here are his well-thought-out, informative answers.