Nick Hockings writes:
Hi,
wrt lobbying, I am busy arranging to write Free Software columns for several magazines. I will raise the issue of patents in these.
That would be great.
I'll need your public GPG key to send you more information about the political contacts we have. Do you think there would be an opportunity for you to make such contacts ? International coverage in these matters is important, I believe.
What you're doing (write in magazines) is an important preliminary steps since political persons are more likely to listen to you if they see texts advocating against software patents in the press. Don't hesitate to ask (to discussion@fsfeurope.org) for proofreading or even ready-to-use texts. It turns out that re-using existing texts is a lot easier, specially since the software patent is so hard to understand.
From Europe, I must admit we know very little about the situation of Free Software in South Africa. Could you tell us if there are magazines, companies supporting Free Software (not Open Source ;-), who are the people advocating for Free Software (photos such as http://france.fsfeurope.org/news/article2001-09-29-01.fr.html are great to get a feeling).
I'm a bit confused by http://cyberlink.idws.com/fsm/ & http://www.fsfafrica.org/ could you explain the relationships between the two ? I assume you're working together anyay ;-)
Cheers,