Dear list,
some news portals already picked it up and every FSFE supporter received a message about it in his inbox: today in the morning we launched a new campaign "Public Money Public Code".
For the campaign we published an open letter [1] together with 31 organisations in which we call for lawmakers to make it mandatory to publish all publicly financed software under a Free Software licence. Among the initial signatories are CCC, EDRi, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as several others.
Prominent support we also got from Edward Snowden, who says: "Right now, the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free Software requirement -- "Free" referring to public code availability, not cost -- we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital."
You find the whole press-release here: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170913-01.en.html
Now it is up to you! Please help and join us by signing this letter and ask your friends and colleagues to do likewise:
Why is this important? Public institutions spend millions of euros every year for the development of new software for them. But the public sector's procurement choices play a significant role in determining which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported with taxpayers' money. This means, that changing policies in public procurement will have a huge positive impact on the Free Software community.
The open letter will be sent to candidates for the current German Parliament election and, during the coming months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives of the EU and EU member states.
Since it is our public money, it should be our public code as well!
This mail can and shall be copied and forwarded.
Best regards, Erik
[1] https://publiccode.eu/openletter/