thanks to:
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| Introduction |
Welcome to the FREE e-democracy project's website. We are a project dedicated to creating the GNU.FREE Internet Voting system and also advocating Free Software in e-democracy.
To understand why we think it's important for e-democracy software to be Free Software which is non-partisan and non-commercial in origin see our Writings Section.
GNU.FREE software is written in Java and is available from the Download Section. There is more information in the Users' Section and considerable technical detail in the Developers' Section.
The GNU.FREE software suite is an official package of the Free Software Foundation's GNU project and is supported by FreeDevelopers.net and OpenElection.org. More affiliates, related sites and people are available from the Connections Section.
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| Latest News |
18-05-2001 Working with the Foundation for Information Policy Research we have had some interesting and enlightening contact with the Office of the e-Envoy. Two documents were received as a result of a Freedom of Information request sent to the UK government have been put online. Go see them >>>
17-05-2001 On May 15th Jason Kitcat of the FREE project attended, via teleconference, the first meeting of OASIS' Election & Voter Registration Technical Comittee. This Committee was founded by Election.com, Microsoft and Accenture - and they all had representatives present at the meeting. There are concerns, what with the corporations involved and the fact that you need to pay to join an OASIS committee, that the resulting standard would be less than open, fair or appropriate. Fortunately the Free Software Foundation paid for Jason to take part and while our membership does not constitute endorsement of OASIS or the standard we feel that Jason's involvement should help to balance the input along with some of the other NGOs involved.
However if you too also want to get involved, either as a member, or in the public parts of OASIS - then please do help to provide more input from the Free Software community's perspective. We feel that most of the people on the committee are well intentioned and are very receptive to new thinking - so let's get involved!
20-04-2001 A new article is online: Direct Democracy: A valid future? A discussion on why we don't believe direct democracy is the way to go.
Also thanks to all those who've submitted translations.
17-04-2001 Several updates, changes, improvements:
A belated Happy Easter to everyone.
28-03-2001 Welcome to the new website! We've moved to free-project.org thanks to contributions from Swing Digital. Hope you like it.
27-02-2001 After nearly four months of hard work we're proud to release the latest version of GNU.FREE - 1.5 - A whole range of new features and improvements make it a landmark release for the FREE e-democracy project. The major changes:
- The name change to GNU.FREE as we become an official GNU package.
- Database cacheing has been implemented with a connection pooling system.
- A wide range of performance tweaks have been done on the code base.
- The JFC Swing interface has been converted to AWT 1.1 (much faster).
- Upgraded to v1.0.4 of log4j and more logging detail.
- The voter authorisation process has been made more secure.
- All database information is encrypted for added privacy.
- All the documentation has been updated.
So what are you waiting for? The latest version of GNU.FREE is hot and it's here >>>
21-02-2001 For all those burning questions we have a Frequently Asked Questions page now. Go see the FAQ >>>
15-02-2001 Jason has written a new article on how electronic voting is the first step in building a revolution in democratic government. Updating the Vogon planning process >>> Also new is the Four Minute Guide to GNU.FREE >>>
9-02-2001 On Thursday 8th February, 2001 Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation officially dubbed FREE a GNU package. Which is nice! As a result FREE becomes GNU.FREE
22-01-2001 We've got a new GNU.FREE in the news and on the web page here >>>
16-11-2000 Ron King has submitted a handy patch to use Interbase with FREE. See it on our Sourceforge tools >>>
15-11-2000 A new article by Jason has just been put online: Taming the Tentacles of Transnationals.
14-11-2000 Roll up! Roll up! Get your hot new code... FREE 1.4 has been released and boy, it's got some great new features: The security protocol has been enhance to improve reliability and protect against reverse engineering of the client; general security has also been tightened with strict boundary tests and an upgraded MAC; we've got new verification checks as well as some great bug fixes. So go get it now >>>
31-10-2000 Happy Halloween! The current HSQL database implementation we are using is not Java 1.3 compliant - however due to the greater availability of Java 1.1 we will not be fixing this bug in the forseeable future. This is not a problem for users who have replaced HSQL with JDBC database access to the system of their choice such as MySQL.
05-10-2000 A motley array of buttons and logos are now available for you to put on your website either as a display of support or to indicate where your totally excellent e-Voting system came from. No obligation downloads are here >>>
23-09-2000 The article "Why electronic voting software should be Free Software" has been put online read it now >>>
11-08-2000 Java Network Launcher Protocol (JNLP) support has now been included to allow easy distribution of the FREE client program through a browser. See the JNLP-INSTALL file for more information or see Sun's page. This takes us to version 1.3 of FREE - download it now >>>
20-07-2000 Sorry about the delay in updates - computer problems. Anyway FREE 1.2.2 is now online with 1 major and 1 minor bug fix. More importantly the INSTALL file has been considerably expanded and improved.
29-05-2000 As part of an increased security focus we now offer PGP signatures for our downloads.
27-05-2000 We've updated the documentation, especially Getting Started thanks to feedback from Kevin Mactavish & Songhai Liu at the Western Nevada Community College IS dept.
18-04-2000 We have released FREE 1.2.1 which offers some bug-fixes, log4j 0.8.3, an automated installation system and we now meet GNU release guidelines.
10-04-2000 You can now download FREE 1.2 which provides faster logging, a timeout system for client-side communications and now analyses the results when all totals have been received.
29-03-2000 FREE 1.1 is now available with logging, improved modularisation and some bug fixes.
25-03-2000 The SSL version has been put on hold until further notice due to the need for Java 1.2 with Sun's SSL implementation and expensive certificates in Entrust's SSL API. If you know of alternative ways of doing this please mail me.
24-03-2000 FREE mailing lists have now been setup, we have Free-dev and Free-announce. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!
20-03-2000 First public release of FREE is now available! Note SSL version is due in the next week.
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