Free Software Foundation Europe

Last weekend, the FSFE visited Oberhausen to participate in OpenRheinRuhr, a well-known Free Software event in north-western Germany. We had a strong booth team, gave talks, and enjoyed talking to tons of like-minded people about politics, technology and other stuff. In this blog post you will learn about some highlights of the weekend and what coat hangers have to do with flat irons.

Alessandro Rubini has stepped down as Vice-president of the FSFE. Alessandro, an electronic engineer with Ph. D. in a computer science, brought invaluable insight to the internal discussions within the FSFE and has worked tirelessly to push the Free Software envelope in Italy and the rest of Europe.

From December 27 to 30, the FSFE will host an assembly during the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress (33C3) including an information booth, self-organised sessions and a meeting point for all friends of Free Software to come together, share or simply relax. We are looking forward to organise sessions in the name of our assembly and we will book proper rooms or offer our assembly itself. Sessions can be inspiring talks, hands-on workshops, community/developer/strategy meetings or any other public, informative or collaborative activity.

Topics can be anything that is about or related to Free Software. We welcome technical sessions but we also encourage to give non-technical talks that address philosophical, economical or other aspects of/about Free Software. We also like sessions about related subjects that have a clear connection to Free Software for example privacy, data protection, sustainability and similar topics. Finally, we welcome all backgrounds – from your private project to global community projects. If you are interested, read more about our call for participation.

On 14 September the European Commission (EC) published its long-awaited proposal for a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market. While we welcome the proposal to introduce a mandatory exception for 'text and data mining' (TDM) in the field of scientific research, we are concerned about the inclusion of a far-reaching "technical safeguards" clause granted to rightholders in order to limit the newly established exception.

Julia Reda ended the QtCon, a conference for the Free Software community, with a closing keynote on, among other things, Free Software in the European Public Sector.