News from 2004
More Recent News
This page holds old news from 2004.
For more recent news items, see:
2004-December-21
For the second time Poland have blocked the undemocratic adoption of the Software Patents directive. Details at FFII.
2004-December-17
Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe will be in Dublin on January 14th to give a talk as a guest of UCD netsoc and IFSO. Details of the talk will follow shortly.
2004-October-31
IFSO sends a formal response to the European Commission consultation on copyright.
There is some more information on the wiki page.
2004-September-27
The IFSO T-Shirts and CD-Roms are here! Send an email to IFSO if you want one. T-Shirt prices are €18 for non-members and €14 for members. A photo of ifso members modelling the shirts at our last meeting (closeup). We will need to know your size and which colour you want. CD-Roms are available at cost (€0.95) to members. Postage will be at cost (or pick them up at a meeting!)
2004-September-27
The Patent Directive has been put back for further consideration. More details and links at the wiki.
2004-August-31
We have installed a wiki to assist with community efforts. The wiki is
currently considered experimental, but will become permanent if it proves
useful. please play nicely.
IFSO Wiki
2004-July-05
Teresa Hackett, IFSO member, meets Bildad Kagai (photo), Co-ordinator of the Free Software and Open Source Software
Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) at a pan-African library conference in
Kampala, Uganda, July 2004.
Both were speakers at a workshop titled "Emerging Issues In
Intellectual Property Rights For The African Information Society".
Topics included copyright, database rights, public lending rights, and
traditional knowledge.
FOSSFA brings together a consortium of partners in Education, Health and
Governments to work towards the achievement of Information Communication
Technology (ICT) objectives in Africa using free software. The 53 member
states of the Committee on Development Information (CODI), a unit of the
Economic Commission for Africa endorsed FOSSFA as the open source foundation
for Africa. FOSSFA's secretariat is based in Nairobi Kenya.
2004-May-25
Last night, 300+ people attended Stallman's talk, including 3 MEP
candidates. The talk was recorded. Audio and Video recordings of the event
are available from
UCD (who did the recording) and are mirrored by
MiNDS>.
The video is MPEG-1 and the audio component is also available separatly as
speex and Ogg Vorbis.
Photographs
from the evening (if you have more photographs of this event that you would
like to share please mail the
webmaster).
2004-May-24
Richard Stallman will be giving a talk titled
"The Danger of Software Patents" in
Dublin on the 24th of May at 19:30, organised in association with the Dublin
University Internet Society (TCD
Netsoc) and Maynooth IT Society (MiNDS>).
The venue will be the MacNeill theatre, which is located in the Hamilton
building at the east end of TCD (near Pearse St. dart station). There is no
charge to attend the talk.
Richard Stallman will explain how software patents obstruct software
development. Software patents are patents that cover software ideas. They
restrict the development of software, so that every design decision brings a
risk of getting sued. Patents in other fields restrict factories, but
software patents restrict every computer user. Economic research shows that
they even retard progress.
Richard Stallman (RMS)
founded the Free Software movement in 1983 when he
announced the GNU project. He went
on to found Free Software Foundation, write
the GNU GPL,
popularised "copyleft"
licensing schemes, and is the original author of GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger, and many
other Free Software packages. He's currently on a six week tour of EU
states to encourage people to work within the political system to prevent
software innovations becoming patentable.
2004-May-14
Just before the Competitiveness Coucil meets on the 17th and 18th of May,
IFSO has sent a letter asking for Irelands representatives to support the
Irish MEPs and European Parliament by retaining the amendments which the
parliament voted for.
The letter references a report from the US Federal Trade Commission which
points out the problems caused by software patentability in the US, an open
letter from 14 prominent European economists on how software patentability
would replace innovation, and an explanation of why Free Software would be
particularly damaged by software patents. The importance of Free Software
to the EU is backed up by a report published by the European Commissions'
Information Society Initiative. (the letter: html)
2004-Apr-23
Come see our stand at the Indymedia Mayday
Festival and Centre. Find out about Free Software, chat to us, join
IFSO!
2004-Jan-5th
hello, world
January 5th 2004, Irish Free Software
Organisation (IFSO) is launched. Since June 2003, members of the fsfe-ie mailing
list have been collaborating on issues such as software patents,
and the European
Copyright Directive.
With Ireland holding the presidency of the EU for the next six months,
political lobbying in Ireland will be of increased importance. The fate of
the software patentability directive is still undecided, and we now also have
the Intellectual Property Rights
Enforcement Directive to deal with. In the coming months, members of IFSO
also plan to work on spreading education and adoption of Free Software in
Ireland. Once we have a proven track record, we hope to become an associate
organisation of FSF Europe.
By no coincidence, today is also the 20th anniversary
of the beginning of the GNU project.
Older News
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