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[FYI] European Free Software Foundation created



http://uk.news.yahoo.com/001128/15/aqbih.html

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Tuesday November 28, 10:01 AM  

European Free Software Foundation created  

Free Software foundation gets a European base  

A European "sister organisation" to the Free Software Foundation 
(FSF) was announced Friday by programmers from Germany to cater for 
the complexity and diversity of the international open source 
community.  

After receiving a blessing from the founder of the Free Software 
Foundation, Richard Stallman, the assembled programmers released a 
declaration of intent posted at the Foundation's new European Web 
site, www.fsfeurope.org and also launched its official mailing list.  

"It has become evident that the FSF in the US, being in a totally 
different time and culture zone, can hardly keep in touch with the 
strong developments and currents in European Free Software," says 
founding member Georg Greve in a statement.  

The creation of the satellite Foundation reflects the growing 
importance of software released under "Free Software" licences world-
wide. This refers to software published under a licensing agreement 
that allows other programmers to view, copy and modify source code so 
long as it is reproduced under the same terms. The most widely known 
of these is the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), under which the 
GNU/Linux operating system is published.  

The growing popularity of Linux, among businesses particularly, 
demonstrates the success that Free Software has seen in recent years. 
Linux is a variant of Unix built on a kernel created by Finnish 
programmer Linus Torvalds. It can be downloaded for free over the 
Internet and is built by thousands of programmers from around the 
world.  

According to EuroLinux, an organisation that promotes Linux and Free 
Software in Europe, this development shows the importance of having 
international representation.  

"It is really important that Europe gets some structure for its Free 
Software community," says a EuroLinux spokesman. "Lots of Free 
Software developers live in Europe. Linux was of course started in 
Europe."  

[...]

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