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FSFE's Fellows have elected their second representative to the organisation's governing body, the General Assembly. Julia Klein will join Torsten Grote in FSFE's strategic decision making body to speak for the Fellows for the next to years.

Will you be able to read your documents 20 years from now? Every day, millions of computer users like you edit text and spreadsheets, take pictures and record audio and video. What if you couldn't read your private letters anymore, or even open that album with pictures from your honeymoon? What if you couldn't exchange those files with friends, because the software used by each one of you can't talk to each other? To help you make your documents future-proof, we celebrate Document Freedom Day on March 31.

FSFE welcomes the arrival of greater competition in the web browser market. From today, Microsoft has to offer Windows users in Europe the possibility to choose among different browsers. This step puts into practice the company's settlement with the European Commission from December 2009. The Free Software Foundation Europe was an active participant in the Commission's investigation.

This year on Valentine's Day, FSFE calls on Free Software users everywhere to show their love for Free Software. Behind every Free Software initiative and organisation there are real, hard-working people.

In January, FSFE was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal as a "trendsetting organisation". This recognition for the hard work of the past years was a good start into the new year.

During the whole of February 2010, FSFE's Fellows will be able to elect their second representative in FSFE's General Assembly. The winner of the election will help FSFE's strategic decision making body plan the future of the organisation, and will join Torsten Grote who occupies the first Fellowship seat since earlier last year. Both Fellowship representatives are full members of the General Assembly for a term of two years, and have all the rights and obligations of other members.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) receives this year's Theodor Heuss Medal for its extraordinary work for equitable participation in the information society. Since 2001 FSFE has been committed to the freedom to use, investigate, modify and redistribute software in all parts of society and politics. Theodor Heuss Foundation states: "FSFE as a forward thinking organisation contributes to the development and establishment of rules for good global governance."

Despite the temperatures dropping below zero all over Europe and the Christmas holidays approaching, FSFE kept working as usual for software freedom. The major news of December are that we have begun to restructure our website, added Andreas Tolf Tolfsen as webmaster deputy coordinator, and published a statement on the EC's settlement with Microsoft in the browser antitrust case. Read on to learn more about what we did in December.

Simon Josefsson is a Fellow and GNU hacker with a special interest in security. His contributions to the Free Software world include such ubiquitous projects as GnuTLS and libssh2, and he was recently presented with the Nordic Free Software Award. Stian Rødven Eide interviewed Simon as a part of our regular Fellowship interviews, asking him about his projects and other security matters.

Free Software Foundation Europe congratulates the European Commission on pushing Microsoft to give users greater choice between different browsers. "The selection screen will make users aware that they can make their own choices," says Karsten Gerloff, FSFE's President. "We are glad that FSFE has helped the Commission to put limits to Microsoft's desktop monopoly."

November: another month full of activities and work to do for FSFE. Among other things we launched the Fellowship grant project, fought for Open Standards in the European public sector, had an excellent time at the FSCONS in Sweden, and participated in WIPO to ensure that Free Software principles are respected. To keep FSFE strong and independent, we have launched our year-end fund raising campaign: Cooking for Freedom.

The European Commission (EC) has given in to the demands of lobbyists for Microsoft and SAP when it revised a key document on interoperability between electronic government services. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has analysed the evolution of a new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), showing that Commission has based its work on the input of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a lobby group for proprietary software vendors, and ignored the voices of a large part of the European software industry. At the same time, remarks by the EC's Vice President about Free Software point to a worrying lack of awareness within the Commission.