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I love it here

Matthias Kirschner's weblog "I love it here"

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Liberate your BITs -- FSFE at BLIT 08

On Saturday I attended the BLIT 08 in Potsdam, which is near Berlin. Grischa organised the FSFE booth there which we stuffed with a good crew from the Berlin Fellowship group.

Two Fellows at our booth at BLIT 08, with FSFE banners in the background.

We explained FSFE's work, distributed leaflets about our work and sold some t-shirts. Apropos T-shirts, we have a new T-shirt which just arrived at my place on Thursday last week. I already added it to FSFE's webshop. The T-shirt shows the Fellowship logo and the German text "Mach Dich Frei!" on the front and the URL of the Fellowship page (fsfe.org) with included FSFE logo on the back.

"Mach Dich Frei" is a German pun. Its first meaning is "Free yourself", the second meaning is "Get undressed" (e.g. a German doctor would say "Machen Sie sich schon mal frei" when you have to put off your shirt).

T-shirt with the German text Mach Dich Frei and the plussy on the front.

Back to the booth. We had one new thing: Stephan (FFII) had a short real time presentation showing people how you can change a software program. He changed the menu order of the webbrowser in the source code and recompiled it. Perhaps we will use that on other events, too. Especially at events with a high number of non-programmers. As they see why it is also important for them that the source code is available and that you have the freedom to modify the program.

All in all I was happy with the event. Thanks to Grischa for the overall organisation and to Christof, Jürgen, Olaf, and Stephan for helping at the booth.

Disclosure: Yes I think the pun on the t-shirt is funny ;)

--
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE's Fellowship and protect your freedom!

Minus one license, Plus one GPL

Ok, it is already some days old, but I was not able to write about it earlier.

Our associated organisation KDE has launched a new forum on 12. October. Beside the result that more people who are not so familiar with the use of e-mail will find help about a Free Software desktop environment, there is one other interesting point: In collaboration with KDE, MyBB's developers released the software under the GPLv3.

"The KDE forum guys have come to us with the wish to use our forum software. In this process, we needed to clear out our licensing, also to make it easier for the KDE community to leverage MyBB. As a result of that, we release the MyBB forum now under the terms of the GPL. This was very well-received by the community around MyBB" (Chris Boulton, project manager, MyBB Group)

Thanks to the MyBB's developers and to the KDE guys for their work to get rid of a strange self-made license.

More information can be found in KDE's press release. There is also a nice article Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. by David Wheeler. He argues that Free Software developers should use an existing widely-used license compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), particularly the GPL, LGPL, MIT/X, or BSD-new licenses. Also he argues against Free Software license proliferation.

--
Matthias Kirschner
Join FSFE's Fellowship and protect your freedom!

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