Activities
Since its foundation in 2001, the FSFE has been working every
single day to further Free Software in Europe and beyond. With
our concrete activities, based upon the three pillars of our work, we
focus on protecting and extending user rights. Some of our
actions run for many years, some are aimed at short-term
developments, but all are part of our mission: empower users
to control technology.
Another major part of our work consists of continuous engagement
and background work. We are present at dozens of conferences per year,
support and maintain an excellent community and
provide it with helpful resources. Furthermore, we are a
prominent contact point for all questions and enquiries around
software freedom, and user rights.
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Why is software created using taxpayers' money not released as Free Software? We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well. Code paid by the people should be available to the people!
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The illustrated book "Ada & Zangemann - a tale of software, skateboards, and raspberry ice cream" by the FSFE, tells the story of the famous inventor Zangemann and the girl Ada, a curious tinkerer. Ada begins to experiment with hardware and software, and in the process realises how crucial it is for her and others to control technology.
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Young people, from all over Europe, compete in Youth Hacking 4 Freedom to win cash prizes by creating programs of their choice licensed as Free Software. The six winners will be invited to the Award ceremony weekend. Youth Hacking for Freedom inspires people to learn programming and to collaborate.
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The FSFE is running a project to make licensing easy for humans and machines alike. It solves a fundamental issue that Free Software licensing has at the very source: what license is a file licensed under, and who owns the copyright? REUSE provides easy recommendations in three steps that help users, developers and legal professionals.
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We often underestimate the power of a simple Thank
You. Free Software contributors do important work for our society and the "I Love Free Software Day" on 14 February is the perfect opportunity for you to express your special gratitude. Since 2010, we have celebrated this wonderful annual event with an ever-growing and diverse community. ♥ ♥ ♥
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Although digital devices are ubiquitous today, the number of devices on which users cannot run Free Software is exponentially increasing. The consequence is an increased loss of control over users’ technology. Device Neutrality aims to enable end-users to bypass gatekeepers to have a non-discriminatory use of Free Software on their devices.
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Device Neutrality is the policy concept to regulate monopoly over
devices and re-establish end-user control over their digital equipment.
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulates the economic activity of large
digital platforms and introduces Device Neutrality in the EU
legislation, fostering access to Free Sofware in Devices.
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Although we should be free to choose the technical devices we use in our private lives, some European Internet Service Providers are dictating which device their customers have to use to connect to the Internet, or discriminating against owners of alternative devices. This undermines our basic freedom of choice.
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Android is a mostly free operating system but unfortunately the drivers for most devices and most applications in the built-in store are not Free Software. This initiative helps you to regain control of your Android device and your data. We collect information about running an Android system as freely as possible and try to coordinate the efforts in this area.
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The FSFE is a partner organisation of NGI, a coalition of non-profit organisations from across Europe. Funded by the EC, it provides grants to work on new ideas and technologies that contribute to the establishment of the Next Generation Internet. The FSFE provides legal support for these projects.
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The FSFE’s Licence Questions mailing list is our group of volunteers dedicated to provide help with Free Software licences and compliance. If you need advice on what Free Software licence you should use, or if you want to know more about what rights you have over a piece of Free Software, you can contact us.
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The FSFE is part of these European consortium to promote and raise awareness about the importance of Free Software, Open Data, and Open Hardware among academia, business, industry, and innovation supporting organizations. As a big part of our work, we are promoting the REUSE specification as an important element for licensing compliance.
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The Legal Network is a neutral, non-partisan, group of experts involved in Free Software legal issues with currently several hundreds of participants from different legal systems, academic backgrounds and affiliations. The aim of the Legal Network is to promote discussion and foster better knowledge of the legal constructs that back Free Software.
More Activities
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The Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) allows software projects to assign and consolidate copyrights to a named fiduciary, for the effective management of their copyright status by this fiduciary. This permits developers to focus on making great applications, rather than spending their time dealing with legal administration. While the FSFE no longer accepts new projects under the Fiduciary Programme, we continue to offer customisable versions of the Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) for your use.
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Keep using your phone with Free Software. Upcycling Android explains
the issue of software obsolescence in the Android world and helps
people flashing their phones with Free Software operating systems.
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In 2021, the Free Software Foundation Europe turns 20. Throughout
this time we have empowered users to use, study, share, and
improve software. In 20 Years FSFE, we thank everyone who helped
us along the way. Here you will find interviews discussing the
FSFE progress as well as technological issues. You are welcome to
celebrate with us!
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An EU regulation may make it impossible to install a custom piece
of software on most radio devices like WiFi routers, smartphones,
and embedded devices. It requires hardware manufacturers to
implement a barrier that disallows users to install any software
which has not been certified by them. We are working to avoid the
expected negative implications on user rights and Free Software,
security, fair competition, the environment, and charitable
community initiatives.
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What better time is there to ask politicians about their stance
on Free Software and Open Standards than in the time before an
election? We believe that we can and should make these topics an
issue in all elections, be it on a European, national, regional,
or local level. Depending on the electoral system and culture,
there are different strategies and tools we use: Ask Your
Candidates a set of questions, the Digital-O-Mat online tool, the
Freedomvote online platform, and the Let's Promise pledges.
We are working towards a world where software does what software
users want it to do. For this, software users must be able to
participate in the development and distribution of the software.
Software patents block this goal by adding legal and financial
risks to software development and distribution and by giving the
patent holders legal power to completely prohibit software
developers from using the patented ideas.
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An initiative aiming to bring Free Software in Education. Goal of the
campaign is to increase the digital sovereignty and competence of the
students, but also of the teachers. Created by the local group Zurich,
Lernen wie die profis ("learning like the professionals"), has been
awarded the DINAcon Award. The activity is in German.
With the PDFreaders campaign we turn the spotlight on government
organisations who advertise proprietary PDF readers, exposing how
frequent such advertisements for non-free software are. With the
help of activists across Europe, we contacted these organisations
and explained to them how to improve their websites so that they
respect our freedom. On pdfreaders.org we present Free
Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.
In 2001 the European Union started investigating Microsoft's
dominant position in the market for desktop operating systems.
The FSFE played two key roles in this case. First, we represented
the interests of Free Software developers. Second, we are a
public interest organisation who cannot be bought off. Thanks to
the excellent work by all involved parties, the case has been won
in all rulings up to the European Court of Justice in 2012.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) regularly participates in various conferences across Europe. These events feature talks and workshops aimed at discussing the diverse activities conducted by the FSFE. Here, you will find a compilation of the latest reports from these engaging events.
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Learn more about Free Software and the people working for software freedom with our Software Freedom Podcast! Tune in to our episodes and be inspired by the remarkable individuals from the Free Software community. Each episode takes you on an exciting adventure, exploring a unique topic related to software freedom
FOSS4SMEs was a two years collaborative Erasmus+ project. The
FSFE worked together with five organisations with different
geographical and work backgrounds to spread and extend the
knowledge about Free Software. To reach this objective, the
project developed free online educational resources for managers
and staff of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Since its foundation in 2001 we have achieved many things. The
FSFE has been instrumental in a successful antitrust-case,
maintained software patents unenforceable in Europe, avoiding a
veritable apocalypse for small and medium-sized tech companies,
and set ground-breaking legal precedents for the whole of the EU.
It's time to celebrate the last 15 years!
The Slovak company EURA Slovakia has been facing EUR 5600 in
fines because it did not buy and use the Microsoft Windows
operating system for submitting electronic tax reports. Slovak
tax administration gave EURA only two options: either to buy and
use Microsoft Windows or face the fines. The FSFE assisted in
this case to advocate for platform-neutral solutions for such
procedures instead. Unfortunately, the court decided against Free
Software and Open Standards, but we were able to raise awareness
about these wrongdoings in Slovakia and beyond.
We want to enable all citizens to have free access to education
and all other public institutions, both online and offline. We
wish to achieve this by pushing for a mandatory use of Open
Standards and guaranteed platform-independent access to all
materials required in the public educational system. This allows
students and parents to use Free Software, enabling them to tap
into their potential for personal growth and development, without
being made dependent of a company. This activity was specifically
aimed at the Dutch education sector.
Can a company modify GPL-licensed software on a third-party
device? The router manufacturer AVM accused Cybits of copyright
infringement and trademark claims because they modify the
original router firmware which is largely based on the Linux
kernel. Together with gpl-violations.org we successfully
convinced the court that the provisions in the GPL license are
binding: software under this license can be freely modified and
installed even if it is shipped as part of an embedded device's
firmware.
The European Commission funds research and development through official
framework programmes (FP for short). From 2007 these framework
programmes were used to select projects for support until 2013. The FSFE
played a central role in supported projects related to Free Software.
STACS (Science, Technology and Civil Society) was a project that sought
to bridge the gap between civil society and research in order to
increase the societal relevance of research being done. The project aimed
to accomplish by educating both civil society organisations and
researchers, and finding common projects to work on for the future.
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a global policy discussion
forum of the United Nations, established as an outcome of the UN
World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). FSFE followed the
IGF to ensure that policy discussions will not endanger digital
freedom in general and Free Software in particular.
The SELF project (Science, Education and Learning in Freedom) aimed
at creating a repository of educational materials on Free Software
and Open Standards. It did this by providing a platform for the
collaborative development of educational materials, as well as by
engaging in the development of educational materials that were missing
in the field today.
Since the very beginning of the standardisation process for
Microsoft's Office Open XML - OOXML (hereinafter MS-OOXML), the
FSFE has expressed serious doubts about whether MS-OOXML could be
considered as open, if even as a standard at all. The FSFE first
raised the issue in the community and led the movement against
the standardisation of MS-OOXML, following closely over the years
the relevant developments.
A second directive on the enforcement of "intellectual
property rights" was proposed by the European
Commission. It aims to criminalise all "intentional,
commercial-scale" infringements, and to allow rights-holders
to take part investigations. The FSFE pointed out to the EU
institutions how such laws encourage abuse of the legal system
and have chilling effects on law-abiding activities.
The June 29th 2007 release of version 3 of the GNU General Public
License (GPL) marked the end of an eighteen month public
consultation process. During this time, the FSFE worked to raise
awareness of the changes proposed for the licence, to help the
community to participate in the public consultation, and to
document the ongoing discussion to make this topic as accessible
as possible.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is one of the 16
specialized agencies of the United Nations system of organisations.
Its role is administrating 23 international treates dealing with
different aspects of limited monopolies on knowledge. As an observer
to WIPO and together with a global coalition of other players with
similar goals, FSFE worked towards reshaping it as a "World
Intellectual Wealth Organisation."
The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
was a two-summit UN conference organised by the ITU at which important cornerstones for
the information and knowledge society were proposed to be laid. The FSFE
participated along with other civil societies to make sure that the
principles of the digital age would protect digital freedom, sharing of
knowledge, access to information, and Free Software.
The Brave GNU World was a monthly column issued from 1999 to 2004 that
addressed technical and non-technical readers alike. Its aim was to
provide insights into current projects and developments based upon the
philosophy of Free Software. The Brave GNU World was translated into nine
languages, possibly making it the farthest-spread monthly column
worldwide.
Funding of research and development by the European Commission
is usually done within the "framework programmes" (FPs). These
last for four years and FP6 started officially on December
17th, 2002. The FSFE sought to help with Free Software related
activities in FP6.
The GNU Business Network had the vision to network all companies,
developers and users in and around Free Software in a way that
the potential synergies are encouraged and informed decisions
become possible.
The objectives were to have Free Software classified as an intangible
world cultural heritage by UNESCO, and registered in the World
Memory Register (another UNESCO project). The Free Software
community and UNESCO share the same values of freedom, equality, and fraternity. Such a recognition would be a great promotion
of Free Software.
The AGNULA project aimed at the creation of a fully functional, entirely
Free Software GNU/Linux distribution for professional audio
users. It is a project run by key players in the audio field
with funding by the European Commission. The FSFE as a
partner of this project is taking care of the legal issues, the
long-term aspects and also making sure the Free Software
community interests are heard.
The European Copyright Directive (EUCD) was the European
equivalent of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
These laws not only lead to the creation of monopolies and
cartels, they also provide serious impediments to the Freedoms of
speech and press, as they provide means for digital censorship.
The FSFE was actively involved in the resistance against
such harmful legislation.
The TUX&GNU@school column was a regular column about Free
Software in education written by by Mario Fux. It informed about
educational Free Software, useful web sites on the topic and
other interesting topics for teachers, students and all software
freedom advocates.
Free Software is often referred to as "Open Source". But we are
convinced that Free Software is the better term: easier to
understand, harder to abuse, well-defined, providing additional
value, and offering freedom. We connected companies,
organisations and even co-founders of the Open Source movement
that prefer to use the term Free Software.
DRM.info és una plataforma col·laborativa iniciada i mantinguda per l'FSFE per
a informar sobre els perills de la Gestió de Restriccions Digitals i fer públiques
les preocupacions de diversos grups. Entre els contribuïdors de DRM.info s'inclouen defensors de
la llibertat digital, la protecció al consumidor, l'activisme de xarxa i les organitzacions de biblioteques.