FSFE introducing "Supporters" and two small tasks for you

It's now possible to become a public supporter of FSFE. This allows you to easily show that you care about Free Software and support the FSFE's activities.

Why?

a) FSFE needs a better way to measure how many people care about Free Software issues, and b) FSFE wants to be able to demonstrate how many people support our mission. Other organisations do this with by using Facebook "friends", and Twitter "followers", but FSFE does not wish to force anyone to register for an external service to show that they care about our mission.

What does it mean?

Becoming a Supporter does not cost anything, and Supporter names and e-mail addresses will not be released. Only the total number of supporters will be published. Supporters may receive occasional important information from us, at most three times a year. As before, they can subscribe to our newsletter, discuss ideas on FSFE's public mailing lists, make a one-time donation , and join the Fellowship .

Two things you can do to help FSFE in less than 10 minutes:

1. Become a supporter!
2. Ask your friends and colleagues -- by e-mail, social networks, or in person -- if they also want to become a supporter. You can e.g. use an URL like "http://fsfe.org/support/?YourFellowshipLoginName" for this. This way you can see who you've encouraged to subscribe at "https://fsfe.org/support/stats?ref_id=YourFellowshipLoginName". You can see the progress of supporter numbers.

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Free Software activists ask Italian Authority for Protection of Personal Data to publish readable documents.

Free Software Foundation Europe and twenty Italian civil society organisations wrote a letter to the President of the Authority for the Protection of Personal Data, asking the agency to ensure that all documents published on its website can be read and used with Free Software programs.

On its website, the agency had offered a PDF document to report data breaches. Although most versions of the PDF file format are Open Standards, this form could only be filled in using a particular proprietary PDF reader.

"This is an obstacle to the users' freedom," says Alessandro Polvani, who coordinates FSFE's activities in Italy. "Public authorities need to make sure that their documents are accessible to everyone. No citizen should have to use proprietary software in order to talk to the public sector."

Beyond the PDFreaders campaign

In FSFE's PDFreaders campaign, volunteers across Europe work to have advertisements for proprietary PDF readers removed from public-sector websites. People in Italy are among the most active participants in the campaign. They have so far reported 488 advertisements, of which almost half (49%) were fixed in response to letters by citizens.

Contact

If you wish to receive further updates, subscribe to our press release mailing list at http://fsfe.org/press.

Further information

Navigazione

• PDFReaders campaign page

  Find out what we already did, and how you can contribute, to the PDFReaders campaign.

• List of signalled institutions

  Find out which Public institutions were signalled in your country.

• Free PDF Readers list

  The pdfreaders.org website collects a list of all free PDF readers, with suggestions to download them, according the technical features of your system.

• The Petition

  Petition to remove advertisements to proprietary software from public institutions websites.

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Results: Free Software voice & video testing

Last weekend on Software Freedom Day the Manchester FSFE Fellowship group, assisted by additional participants in Britain and Germany, spent the afternoon testing Free Software alternatives to Skype.

Results

The 25 sets of results were recorded, and can be browsed, sorted, and searched below.

Six audio tests successfully passed (24%), as did five video tests (20%). Mumble was the most successful client, passing 100% of tests (audio only, video is not yet supported). XMPP passed four out of 14 audio tests, whereas SIP passed only one out of ten (both video and audio). Of nine apps tested, only Mumble, Pidgin, Jitsi, and Google Talk's web client achieved passes.

Conclusions

The clients tested performed more poorly than expected, probably due to network problems. One of the difficulties in testing was that generally there was little or no information about why the test had failed.

SIP clients couldn't connect successfully except when both testers used the same client, and had accounts on the same SIP server. This was surprising, especially considering that the accounts used for testing were is many cases paid for and commercially supported.

The only client and protocol which consistently did what it promised was Mumble, which had 100% test pass rate. Unlike all other clients, Mumble uses its own protocol, and also offers audio conferencing and text-to-speech by default. Mumble users are constrained to using the same server however, unlike SIP and XMPP users who should theoretically each be able to use a separate server of their choice.

It would have been useful to have a local SIP and XMPP server on the same network as the testers in order to better identify network related problems. This could have helped determine whether failures stemmed from the client, network, or server..

Examining STUN and ICE configurations was beyond the scope of our tests, but as these technologies seem critical to whether calls succeed or fail, they merit careful examination when choosing or configuring SIP and XMPP servers.

FSFE Fellows will be pleased to note that XMPP calls using FSFE's own XMPP server were often successful: several volunteers could see and hear each other when both were using their @jabber.fsfe.org accounts.

A Skype alternative?

Skype uses a variety of notorious methods to punch through network obstacles like firewalls, and to ensure it can locate the intended call recipient wherever they may be. It also benefits from being a centralised system where, if necessary, all roads lead to Rome (or a Skype managed server, at least).

Contrastingly, Free Software systems play by conventional rules of network traffic, and try and connect callers using established procedures. They also have to communicate with a variety of different servers, which may operate in ways they don't know or expect. In addition to this, some of the chat clients that we tested have only recently added support for more than text-based chatting (Gajim in Debian testing is too old for video, for example), and probably add a few problems of their own into the mix.

Based on our test results, those looking for a Free Software Skype alternative should use either Mumble, or SIP with all callers on the same server and using the same client.

Moving Forward

We had hoped to publish a conclusive compatibility table of chat clients, providing a reference for people needing to know "what works with what", and "what is easiest". Instead, we have table of subjective results, and a list of questions:

• How can we determine whether an XMPP server supports audio and video ('Jingle')?
• How can we gather more detailed information about why a call failed?
• How can we determine whether a SIP or XMPP server supports STUN (and should therefore be less prone to network issues)?

If you have answers to these questions, please share them in the comments of the blog edition of this article.

Table

More data is available in the table source code.

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Freiburg - hebelt geheimes Gutachten Gemeinderatsbeschluss aus?

Dieser offene Brief wurde soeben von der Open Source Business Alliance, der Free Software Foundation Europe und dem Bundesverbands Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie an die Bürgermeister und die Mitglieder des Gemeinderats der Stadt Freiburg sowie an den Leiter des Amtes für Bürgerservice und Informationsverarbeitung verschickt:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

der Freiburger Gemeinderat hat im Jahr 2007 beschlossen, das Dokumentenformat "Open Document Format" (ODF) als Standardformat für den Dokumentaustausch festzulegen. Dieser Beschluss war auch die Grundlage dafür, das Office-Paket "OpenOffice" in der Freiburger Verwaltung als Standardsoftware für Textverarbeitung, Tabellenkalkulation usw. zu verwenden.

Nach uns vorliegenden Informationen setzt die Verwaltung der Stadt Freiburg zur Zeit jedoch wieder die Ablösung von "OpenOffice" durch ein proprietäres Office-Paket um oder bereitet diese Ablösung zumindest vor.

Grundlage hierfür ist anscheinend ein extern angefertigtes, unter Verschluss gehaltenes Gutachten. Die für die Umstellung benötigten Budgets sind - soweit uns bekannt - bereits genehmigt und Mitarbeiter werden über die bevorstehende, erneute Umstellung informiert.

Dass weder im Gemeinderat, noch öffentlich eine das Gutachten würdigende Diskussion stattgefunden hat, ist mindestens ungewöhnlich. Das gilt umso mehr, weil es einen Gemeinderatsbeschluss gibt, der das Gegenteil von dem festlegt, was nun umgesetzt werden soll. Wir sind deswegen besorgt darüber, ob die Verwaltung der Stadt Freiburg sich über die Beschlüsse der Legislative hinwegsetzt oder zumindest versucht, schwer änderbare Fakten zu schaffen.

Wir würden deswegen gerne wissen:

1. Warum das den jetzigen Wechsel stützende Gutachten nicht öffentlich gemacht wird?
2. Wie vor dem Hintergrund einer Umstellung auf Microsoft Office die Umsetzung des Gemeindaratsbeschlussses von 2007 zum Open Document Format sichergestellt sein wird?

Für Ihre Antworten bedanken wir uns herzlich im voraus und stehen für Rückfragen gerne zur Verfügung.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Peter Ganten - Vorsitzender des Vorstands der Open Source Business Alliance
Holger Dyroff - Sprecher der Working Group Public Affairs und Vorstandsmitglied der Open Source Business Alliance
Matthias Kirschner - Deutschlandkoordinator der Free Software Foundation Europe
Marco Schulze - Bundesverband des Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie

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Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation