The International Forum on free culture and knowledge will take place from October 29 to November 1st 2009 in Barcelona. This event is a unique opportunity to bring together under the same roof the main organizations and active voices in the world of free culture and free knowledge; a meeting point to sit down and work together setting common agendas and strategies, and also to reflect, from a critical point of view, on the different views, dangers and contradictions of free culture.

The ODF Alliance, of which the Free Knowledge Institute is a member, has published a Fact Sheet [PDF; also available as text on their website] for governments and others interested in how Microsoft's SP2 for Office 2007 handles ODF.

The Free Knowledge & Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event that focuses on the production and sharing of free educational and training materials about Free Software. It aims to:

We have signed the Stop Software Patents .eu petition to support their view on serious restrains current software patent legislations cause. "The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on software at all.

A first draft of this article has been sitting for months in my hard disk. I decided to finish it after reading that Microsoft will offer its operating system and office suite for $3 per machine to developing countries. That made me think of the way the giant software company “helps” these countries by giving licenses of its proprietary software almost for free, and that in turn made me think of free milk. Let me tell you about it.

Article presented to the online Congress - Observatory for Cybersociety 2006, by Wouter Tebbens