hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0857.txt

Episode: 857
Title: HPR0857: Sam Tuke - Free Software Foundation Europe
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0857/hpr0857.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:39:04

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Phalan and it's the two of Alcamp and I'm here with the
Free Software Foundation Sandtook.
Free Software Foundation Europe.
And what's the difference between the Free Software Foundation and the Free Software
Foundation Europe?
So FSFE, the Free Software Foundation Europe is the sister organization of the FSF and
we're based in Europe, we tend to focus more on European issues and we have a base in
several different European countries.
We're in regular communication with the Free Software Foundation in the States but we
are independent and European Sandtook.
So I imagine the legal ramifications have been in the UK as opposed to Germany as opposed
to the Netherlands because there's a bit of a problem when you come to talk about free
software.
In terms of fighting legal battles in Britain, yeah absolutely, there are different concerns
in Britain for instance because we have laws which affect, for instance particularly
procurement in public sector and different policies and approaches that our government
has which isn't necessarily affected by policies in Brussels or policies in other European
countries.
Our European base, we have an office here in Manchester, we try and keep a close eye on
particularly threats to Free Software in the UK and try and raise it on political agendas.
We've been in discussion with the home office in the last couple of months about changes
to procurement policy for instance for government departments here in the UK and we've helped
to write a document called open source options for government which hopefully in future will
be used by UK public bodies as a guide for choosing free software alternatives to typically
use proprietary software, everything from databases to document management to collaborative
tools and so on and so forth.
So what's the main role of the organisation?
In Europe as a whole?
Yeah and in the UK.
So we fight for awareness and use of free software in as many ways as we can effectively and
that covers a pretty broad range of activities as you can imagine.
There's a lot of community work, we have local groups in cities that meet regularly and
focus on issues in that particular place like contacting local councils for instance in
Manchester, I've been in contact with candidates at the last election for instance trying to
get free software discussed and again become more of a political issue on a local level.
And also we've had a lot of people contacting us community members lately about things like
library closures and how free software can be used to buy by library services to improve
outreach for less money or improve the services and the materials that are made available
by a local library by using free software services and things like that.
And also as I've been mentioning earlier it also involves a lot of procurement stuff both
in Britain and particularly to European level where we have representatives of FSFE more
or less permanently stationed in Brussels who are working with the European Parliament,
working with the European Commission, often being involved in high profile court cases
related to free software in different European countries.
We were recently in court over this case of AVM versus SIBITS which was quite a high profile
case occurring in Germany in which the GPL was effectively being threatened by a company
claiming that another company wasn't allowed to redistribute modifications that they've
made to the Linux kernel and we were working with GPL violations.org and we had representatives
in that case trying to achieve the best outcome for free software effectively.
So it seems to be more a political organisation than a legal organisation?
Yeah, well we have a legal team called the Freedom Task Force and that's actually the
biggest network of free software related lawyers in the world and we have that group, that
part of FSFE has events and conferences so we do focus on legal issues a lot but it's
the politics, it's all about freedom basically for us and that is a political issue and we
try to raise it wherever we can.
So with a lot of people listening from across Europe I guess as well, I live in the Netherlands
so can I join your organisation?
Absolutely, absolutely, in fact anybody from any country globally can join the organisation.
Free software foundation Europe has quite a few members from the United States actually
and different people have different motivations for joining FSFE when they're not based
in Europe but I think there's a lot of people who are very keen to see things like software
patents not getting a firm hold in Europe even when they're not living in Europe because
they know it will affect them, people they know and their work especially if they're publishing
internationally which most software developers do of course these days.
Okay, fantastic and how can I help, how can I contribute?
Well joining our Fellowship programme would be the best way.
We have 1000 Fellows approximately in Europe right now all over the place and when you're
a fellow it's just a great way to support the organisation and become part of a community
of software activists effectively.
Some of our Fellows don't get involved at all with local activities they just want to
be able to support the organisation with a donation but some of them get heavily involved
and have their own business cards from FSFE, organised local groups campaign locally.
We have a campaign called pdfreaders.org which is about trying to raise awareness of alternatives
to proprietary software readers and also raise awareness of the fact that pdf isn't open
standard.
It's an important issue particularly for government documents and so on and that campaign
was originally started by a Fellowship group not by our organisation centrally and that's
a great example of how individuals can work within the framework of FSFE to promote freedom
and we really encourage that.
Okay fantastic.
Can you give us the link for your website?
Absolutely fsfe.org and if you're a UK listener then fsfe.org forward slash UK there's
UK specific news and events on there and there are other community teams as well so wherever
you're from have a look see if there's news particularly relevant to you.
Okay thank you very much Sam there will be a link in the show notes to this episode
with all the sites that we've talked about today.
Okay thank you very much and tune in tomorrow for another episode of Hacker Ball.
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