2001 The European Parliament wants Open Source for security reasons

29.   Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;

30.   Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;

31.   Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the ‘least reliable’ category;

Source

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European Union lost open source decision C(2006) 7108

Recently I stumbled upon a footnote in an old IDABC presentation, then had a look at the Commission registers with the reference and found a document from the Commission that was not made public yet.

C(2006)7108/1 22/12/2006 Enterprise and Industry Draft Commission Decision concerning the use of an open source software licence related to sofware developed under the IDA or IDABC programmes

A final version of the decision is not found in the register. In Europe you can file a request for public document access under the  regulation EC/1049/2001 and usually get what you ask for. IDABC is now superceded by a new EU programme for interoperability, ISA. Apparently the Commission decision was later updated when the 1.1 version of the European Union Public License was approved. The EUPL is a wise choice for software from the public sector and enterprises as it is the legally best reviewed license for European market jurisdictions, available in all EU languages, it does not contain a political agenda and is compatible to most common licenses such as the GPL.

View this document on Scribd

Any further questions?

• Was C(2006) 7108 ever formally adopted or “top killed”? Does “The European Commission approved the EUPL v.1.0 on 9 January 2007” refer to C(2006) 7108?
  It seems the document was adopted.
• Why is a final decision not found in the register?
  Because the Commission decided so on purpose! Very fishy.

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LXDE accepted for Google Summer of Code

LXDE Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code. The students application period starts on March 29: ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC

Congratulations, your application for LXDE Foundation as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2010 has been accepted! Over the next few days, you should plan to register your mentors and complete some housekeeping tasks to make sure your pages on the GSoC 2010 site are up to date. …

The complete GSoC timeline is here: http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/faqs#timeline

Please add more ideas for development projects to the LXDE Idea Page on http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Google_Summer_of_Code_2010

Discuss projects on oftc #lxde

We also need mentors. Mario suggested to schedule an IRC meet up for potential mentors on Sun 21, 2010.

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Unterminiert Open Source den Wert geistigen Eigentums?

Letzten Monat schrieben mir die Virtuellen der Naumann-Stiftung folgende Einladung:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ob Bilder, Filme, Musik oder Texte – nirgendwo lassen sich Inhalte so schnell finden und kopieren wie im Internet. Opensource- und Common Rights-Angebote drängen das Bewusstsein über den Wert geistigen Eigentums immer weiter zurück. Wie sieht die aktuelle rechtliche Situation im Urheberrecht eigentlich aus? Was müssen Sie im Umgang mit Werken Anderer ob im Beruf, im privaten Bereich, in Ihrem Verband oder der Partei beachten? Welche Forderungen der unterschiedlichen Interessengruppen gibt es und wie sieht die liberale Forderung für ein modernes Urheberrecht aus?
Lernen Sie mehr und diskutieren Sie mit unseren Experten.

Ein spannendes und vielschichtiges Thema. Eingeschmuggelt ist die kontroverse und ebenso vielschichtige These, dass offene Lizenzmodelle den Wert des geistigen Eigentums in der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung zurück drängen.

Hier gibt es mehr dazu.

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Google Wave Developer Preview

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