 work. So the FSFE is working to promote software freedom and empower users to control technology. We do that by promoting free software, also called open source software. I think I don't have to explain that into details here. It means that every person has the right to use the software for any purpose to study the source code, to share the software with others again and to improve it. The FSFE's work can be divided into three main areas. One area is the public awareness area. One of the areas is our policy area. And the third one is the legal area. And I brought some examples from the last 20 years. We found it in 2001 as an independent sister organization of the FSFE in the US. And I brought you some examples of the different areas of work here. And yes, so in the first one, that's the public awareness area, we participate in a lot of events during the year as probably many of you as well. And while the last months have been mainly online, I hope that in future we will soon again meet and eat pizza together, have great conversations together, listen to talks while we are in the same room. So that's one big part of the FSFE's work that we are reaching out to people talking with them about our topics there. Besides that, we also have some information material on our website to make sure that everyone in Europe who wants to further promote free software that they can get resources from us. So it's easier for you to promote free software towards your peers, towards friends, towards colleagues, towards family. And yeah, we also have some merchandise, especially now during summer when everybody can see your t-shirt again, great opportunity to promote free software there. So you can go there at the moment we have some summer sale, get some nice t-shirts and promote free software towards the people around you. One other part in the public awareness area is that since a few months now we are also doing a podcast. So we wanted to make sure that people who prefer more listening than reading or watching that they also can learn more about software freedom. And we did several interviews there, like with Cory Doctorow about digital restriction management, with KDE, with Lawrence Lasik here in the picture about code and other lots of cyberspace and regulation in general and several other interesting topics there. So if you are into listening or if you haven't tried it yet but want to go on our website and check it out and let us know how you like it. One other big area, one other big larger topic we worked on for several years since we were founded is that we worked to counter software patents. So it was one of the convictions we had that software patents are harmful for software development, also harmful for free software development. So we worked for a long time to explain to the public and to wider audience why patents are bad in the software field. We worked on that for many years, prevented some policies there as well. But one of the main points there was really to raise awareness in the public that software should not be patented. One other part was that we sent handcuffs to the former Pope. Why did we do that? Well, that was part of an activity called Document Freedom Day, which we organized for many, many years. And the idea of that activity was to promote open standards. And in that case, we asked everyone around the world who of the people out there would need more education about open standards and free software. And we prepared an info package to explain why free software is important and why open standards are crucial. And to make our point a bit more, yeah, rememberable, we added some handcuffs in the packages and to show the vendor lock in of proprietary standards. And one of those proposals was also to send it to the Pope. So we also sent handcuffs to the Pope together with the information. I never found out what happened with the handcuffs there. On the other hand, what we heard about one of the packages. It was the former vice president of the European Commission. She also got one of those packages. And she actually then used the handcuffs in one of her talks and talked about the proprietary, talked about standards and why open standards are important and that she's supportive of that and also showed the handcuffs there. A few years later, I also once met her and she told me then the story about some tricky situations with airport security as she wanted to keep those handcuffs and in the end had to give up and hand them out to airport security. So yeah, we try to raise awareness and sometimes also do that by sending handcuffs. Then also in this area, we handed out awards to motivate people and organizations who are already doing great things for free software open standards. In that context, many open standards. And this is an example here of the German public radio, the Deutschlandfunk. And they were already very early on using Okwabis and other free formats then. And we handed them over this nice cake there. Did the same for Tagesschau in Germany. So the first television news broadcaster there. And they were using free video formats and then German newspaper, the TATS for using open standards for their e-papers and also without DRM. So that was something which we did for several years that we were highlighting good work done by other organizations. So that it's not always about criticizing but about encouraging people to continue with their good work. One other area, one other activity we do regularly to raise more awareness and to also make sure that free software community is a little bit more pleasant place to be involved in is that every year on the 14th of February, we organized the I Love Free Software Day. So we encourage every one of you, everyone else out there to say thank you to other free software developers out there, other free software contributors. Tell them that you like their work, thank them for their contributions and make sure that besides sending feature requests, bug reports or criticizing others work, which is also important that we make progress and improve that you also don't forget about saying thank you. So if you haven't yet marked a day in your calendar, mark it now, 14th of February, say thank you to a few colleagues from OpenSUSE from other communities. So yeah, that's something which we have done now for many, many years. Furthermore, a bit more technical area, we for many years worked on the free your Android campaign, where the goal is to make sure that you can use a phone with as much free software as possible. That started already in 2013, I think, and we're running that for several years then. And so we did workshops for people to flash their phones, we did workshops to show people how to use free software app stores on their phone or for developers how they can get their apps into those free app stores. And that's actually one of the activities which in the next months we want to start more again. So if you're interested in helping people to install free software on their mobile phones, different solutions there, please get in touch with us. We would like to organize more workshops again there in the next several months. So that will be very much increased again. So yeah, especially if you have some technical expertise there, we would be very happy if you join us for this. Furthermore, we wanted to raise more awareness about public administrations doing advertisement for proprietary software and why this is bad. For this, we were running our PDF readers campaign. So you see it on the left side, there's a website promoting a proprietary PDF reader. And they tell you that, well, to open those files, you need this proprietary PDF reader. And the goal there was to get this removed. And we thought that this is a bad practice. It would be comparable to an advertisement on the highway that you can just drive on this road with a car from this manufacturer. And you can do greatest test drive at your car shop around the corner. So what we did there was we, with the help of many people out there gathered all the addresses of public administrations who are doing such advertisement, then we sent a lot of letters out because we decided that sending letters is more successful there than if you just write emails. And then we contacted all of them. And yeah, for this we had, in the end, we contacted over 2,100 public administrations all around Europe and have been able to get 1,125 of them removed. So over 50% success rate there. Also the German government afterwards recommended our tech snippets to include in websites so that you don't promote just proprietary software, but that you say that there are also other free software solutions for this. During the campaign, also the PDFium sources, which is the power in Chromium, which is displaying PDFs was also published under a free software license before that part was proprietary. And yeah, so on the left side, you see one of my favorite examples that's in in German, but I will quickly read it out. So it's from the city of Hamburg. And they say, decide for free software PDF reader. There are many programs to read and write PDFs. The following list of PDF readers is Wendell Neutral. All those programs offer software which respects your four freedoms to use, study, share and improve. This gives you control over your computer and helps you to protect your privacy. And all of that was for many years visible on hamburg.de slash adobe. So going, we already went more a little bit to the policy area. So we did one other activity where we continued with approaching public administrations directly together with OpenSUSE as well and many, many other organizations. So that's our public money, public code campaign. I think I don't have to go into the details here because yesterday Bonnie Merring was already giving a whole talk about the campaign and how you can use this framework to get active yourself approaching public administrations like your university, school, the public administration in your city and so on. So just if you haven't seen it yet, then check out the talk by her as well there. What we did there was we were reaching out to many, many politicians raising awareness about the campaign by sending each politician their letters with roses to remind them about free software. We developed brochures with more information about public money, public code and why you should use free software in digital infrastructure of the of the government and public administrations. You can order those materials like the other materials I mentioned before on our website in German and English it's printed there are some other language versions available there. And yeah, one other area which we were doing lately was which we were involved lately was in general discussions in the policy field about free software during the pandemic. And that was something where we meanwhile accomplished that free software is kind of the gold standard for all kind of apps around free about the pandemic. So meanwhile, it's not just us who have to remind people about is that is that software is that app now free software is that software free software but many, many other organizations joined in there and it's always asked about this aspect as well. So that's a very positive part there. And with the German Corona tracing app, this one actually also is now published in asteroid thanks to the work of several volunteers there, especially from micro G as well who made it possible that you can run this Corona tracing app now without any proprietary software on on your phone. Beside that there were also lots of discussion about in general sharing software to tackle the pandemic about toolkits to share with each other. And a large part there was also that there were many discussions and statements happening during that time where it became more and more clear that the arguments which we use before for many years to talk about talk about software freedom that they are now way better understood and that it's way more on the top of the head of the people that you cannot counter global problems if you don't work together on global solutions but everyone is just doing things on their own with their IT. Furthermore, for public money, public code, one important step there is also that we are getting support by more and more different political parties in the whole party spectrum. So two years ago, the decision from the biggest European conservative party, the German CDU was to support public money, public code, the publicly finance software should be published under free software license. That's a big step. Of course, a lot of implementation is still missing there. And we have to follow up there and remind people, remind politicians all the time, but also getting such announcements and seeing that from parties who have blocked the adoption of free software for many years before. That's a big step, which was now happening there over the last couple of years. Moving over to the topics which are slightly more in the legal area and which also again display that the FSFE is often working for many, many years on a topic to make a change there. So you have seen it before with the software patents and with public money, public code, they were running for many years. And here the case about Microsoft, that was something which went on for over 10 years. So the European Commission found Microsoft guilty of antitrust behavior that they used the monopoly in the desktop market to also get a monopoly in the workgroup server market. And we were supporting the European Commission in this. And then when Microsoft sued the European Commission in front of the European Court of Justice, we were also third party supporting the European Commission to uphold their claims to against Microsoft. In the end, Microsoft had to pay a fine of 860 million euros there. On the other hand, over all those years, we have seen that they have spent over 3 million to buy people out and other organizations out of this with some other agreements. And then afterwards some party said that they are not interested in it anymore. And at the end, FSFE was one of the only third parties still involved in this case. So that was very long work there, but it was important to make sure that free software solutions can compete with Microsoft in this area, like in this case, Samba, for example. Now, one other area of importance is to make sure that there is a better understanding of the legal aspects of free software. So in the early years, we have seen that many companies, they did not adopt free software because their legal department thought that they cannot do that because else they might have to publish all the code and all the data from their company, just as an example there. And also developers wanted to use more free software for the company, for their products, they were blocked by the legal department. So that was one of the reasons why we were setting up a legal network and bringing together people from legal experts like lawyers, compliance engineers and so on to discuss legal topics and legal questions about free software. And we meanwhile have over 400 members there worldwide on the mailing list. And they can discuss there without having to fear that their name or what a certain person there said will be made public. We also organize a yearly conference under the same circumstances so that they can talk openly, learn from others, see what they can do to make better and more informed decisions about free software legal topics. And one of the experiences we made there was that by learning from some other peers who are in similar situations but for another company, maybe even competing companies, but they hear from them how they are handling legal topics there, that it was way easier for them to also make those changes in the company so that it enabled them to use more free software and also to publish more free software in their companies. Recently, we also started with Reduce.Software. And Reduce.Software, the goal there is to make it easy to use more free software in their companies. There is to make it easy for humans and machines to understand copyright and license information of different components of the software. You can check that out on Reduce.Software and see that it's very simple to follow those guidelines. And it's something that the Linux kernel is now also constantly working since the beginning to implement. The KDE framework meanwhile is completely reused, compliant there. We also saw it with the iOS version of the Corona Barren app, which I mentioned before. And there are many more who now implement this in their software. So it's afterwards better to understand what the original author of that software wanted to do with the software and that you can be compliant with that. So check it out. It's very simple. The guideline. You also have some API there. You can integrate it in the CI. And if you have any questions there, just contact us. One thing at the moment is that we just a few days ago announced Reuse Booster. That's a program where you can apply or you can tell others to apply it there that the FSVE is helping them to make their software reuse compliant. So it's afterwards easier to also use these components in other software again or in general that it's easier for others to reuse it without having to fear about legal problems. We did similar work there for a European commission project just in the next generation internet. So what we are doing there is we are part of a consortium where people apply with their ideas about software projects. And then the consortium, they help those projects to be successful with their projects. And our part there is that we are checking those projects for free software license compliance and help them with legal questions about their projects. So till now we have checked over 120 projects there, helped them to better understand free software licensing, made sure that they can concentrate more on the hacking and we help them to deal with the obligations they have from the legal side. 32 projects there already also implemented the reuse guidelines there. And by the end of this year, we will then have around 150 projects which are published then as free software financed through the European Commission. Continuing now on the legal policy part is we are involved with the radio equipment directive. So the radio equipment directive is a regulation for Wi-Fi routers, mobile phones or embedded devices which have any way of connectivity with others. And what this regulation does there is it makes it very hard to modify the software on other devices. And that's something which we see as a great threat for free software that you are not allowed to make modifications to the software on your devices. And that's why we were participating there in many consultations and meetings about this. We also published a legal study on this topic and together with several technical experts in the radio area, we are following up there and constantly raising awareness there, trying to make sure that the regulators there understand that this would have a negative impact for free software and why they should find some compromises there how to do this regulation. So that part is at the moment a bit in the yeah it's progressing not that fast but on the other side slightly connected to this is also from the networking area. We are for many years already active in the to work for router freedom. So that's the right to choose your own device which you can then have between your home network and the internet. And we have been quite successful there in Germany from 2013 to 2016 to make sure that this even came into the coalition agreement there and then it was made clear that in Germany you can decide which router you want to have at home and the internet service provider cannot force you to choose a certain device and that's important so that you can also run your own free software on free software there on this device. Now it went up to the European level and we again had to work out with several technical experts there with cable modems, DSL modems and so on to counter all the different arguments brought forward by internet service providers there. At the moment it's the different countries in Europe they should implement this so we are heavily working together with organizations in Austria and Germany and Greece and I want to work with other organizations other countries there as well to prevent this regulation to end up in you being forced to use a certain router at home and not being able to run free software there. If you are interested there we just recently published an activity package which helps you to get active on these points so check that out on our website we would highly appreciate it especially if you are in some other EU countries which are not yet listed here so please reach out to us there. Furthermore all those activities which I just mentioned as some examples of the work that happened in the past 20 years most of that work is done by volunteers and so we have volunteers on one side we have staff but we would not be able to get such a reach and achieve such results without a large amount of volunteers who help in many different areas from the work groups who work on the specific topics I just mentioned but also on some other levels like participating at local meetings and organizing local events to promote free software there or some online discussions giving feedback about proposals we also have teams to translate and proofread so a lot of our website is translated and material is translated in many different languages so if you are interested to help there or you know people who want to help there besides doing volunteer work for OpenSUSE that's highly appreciated there or if you want to participate at organizing booths for us also like at some street festivals or other events all this is then done by volunteers there and why are we doing all of that what I just mentioned as I said in the beginning it's mainly to make sure that we have a right for software freedoms so that everyone for any purpose without any negotiation and often not actually the need to read the license can use it for whatever they want that you can study analyze learn and discuss about the software that you can again share it with others so you can distribute publicly to help some others or also to earn some money with it without any permissions required and to further improve it adopt it extend it fork it repair it because we believe that that's important for digital society where more and more is controlled by computers around us so I would like to thank all of you here for the work you are doing for software freedom around OpenSUSE I'm greatly convinced that you can achieve change in society by many many people doing many many things and then in sum together those things all together they will make a change and that's why I would like to thank you very much for the work you are doing there we should continue to do those small little things continuously all the time for software freedom so thank you very much I hope that gave you a short overview of what could be done in this half an hour of what the FSVE was doing in the past years and yes thank you very much and as I said if you besides contributing to OpenSUSE also have some more spare time there we are happy if you join us as well you see that on the website there so thank you very much thank you to the organizers for organizing this online event I know that's a lot of work to organize this when you were used to do physical meetings again and I'm very much looking forward to see all of you then again at real meetings in person and so we can better chat with each other and then further continue to work for software freedom thank you very much and enjoy the conference