Ciarán O'Riordan
oriordan [at] fsfeurope.org
About
Working for FSFE in Brussels since April 2005, Ciaran's current role is to support the Free Software community and facilitate activities through the Fellowship of FSFE. This involves writing articles, organising regional meetings, giving input on political campaigns, and participating in community forums such as FSFE's mailing lists. Ciarán's goals are to make the work of FSFE transparent and understandable, and to provide motivated Free Software supporters with information to help them get active.
Ciarán began working for FSFE during the large-scale campaigning against software patents, taking on the role of EU policy coordinator. In 2006 and 2007, his focus shifted to licensing issues and coordinated FSFE's work to raise awareness and community participation in the process to update Free Software's core licence, the GNU General Public License (GPLv3).
Before working for FSFE, he was a software developer and in his spare time campaigned for software freedom on copyright and patent related EU directives.
Projects
Below is a list of projects Ciarán has worked on for FSFE. In the section that follows (Articles & documents) you can find a selection of Ciarán's published works on these topics.
- The Fellowship of FSFE
- Software patents
- The GPLv3 drafting process
- IPRED2
- Public speaking - (see his list of engagements)
- FSFE representation to policy meetings of the European Commission.
- Writing and maintaining FSFE webpages.
- Assisting and building the Free Software community, particularly in Ireland and Belgium, and to some extent in the UK, the Netherlands, and France.
Articles & documents
Below is a selection of the articles written by Ciarán while working on the above projects.
On software patents:
- The future of the software patents battle
- Do software patents exist in the EU?
- Working breakfast on Community Patent
- On his own website: Software Patents
On drafting version 3 of the GNU GPL:
- Transcripts of the major GPLv3 events
- Tivoisation explained - implementation and harms
- How GPLv3 Tackles Licence Proliferation
Further Information
More information is available at Ciarán O'Riordan's personal homepage.
Another source of information is his blog: Ciarán's free software notes.
To top