[pp.int.general] What if the EU Parliament could rely on Free software?

[Valentin Villenave]

Greetings everybody,

I just wanted to quickly mention that several european MPs from
different countries (Jean Louis Cottigny, Pierre Pribetich, Michel
Rocard, Bronisław Geremek, Daniel Cohn-Bendit) have made a declaration
"on the use of open source software" a few months ago. Among their
proposals:

"The European Parliament,
[...]
C. whereas European citizens have the inalienable right freely to
access documents and
information from the institutions which represent them,
D. whereas the use of open source software is one of the effective
ways of reducing this
digital divide and whereas this solution, established by some Member
States in their
administrations, delivers significant results,

1. Calls on the European Union to take the necessary measures to help
finance public
research on open source software;
2. Calls for Parliament to switch its whole computer network to this
type of software;
[...]"

Nice, eh? But... the point is: they need 393 signatures by September
the 25th (yeah, it's a bit late obviously).
Currently they only have 93, most from Socialists AFAICS. The French
FSF-related APRIL organization (that has already managed to make the
whole French National Assembly run GNU/Linux!) has issued a call for
help; maybe we could take that into account somehow?

If you're interested in contacting any MP, here's a list:
http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/MEPs_by_country

Cheers,
Valentin