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

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/9/17 Daniel Nyström <daniel.nystrom at piratpartiet.se>:

> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/gobuntu-devel/2008-June/000795.html

That would certainly be a great thing.

The reason why I talked about Ubuntu and codecs in the first place is
because, while I see many columns celebrating the choice of the French
Parliament to make the switch to GNU/Linux, people often tend to
forget that this move was made immediately after the *very same*
parliament voted a bunch of laws that could have been directly written
by the RIAA and Microsoft (actually they were, but that's another
story).
These laws endanger democracy and freedom for the citizens of France
and Europa (since these were either derived from EUCD or backported
afterwards to the European Committee), and precisely led to the
foundation of the Parti Pirate.
*But*, in a very schizophrenic move, the parliament adopted GNU/Linux
systems for its MPs two months later! And they had to pay a company to
strip their distro from the very same pieces of software *they* had
made illegal two months ago...

My guess is: this people absolutely do not have a clue what this is
about. They just blindly voted whatever Virgin/Universal/etc wanted
them to vote, and likewise two months later they blindly used the new
laptops that had been given to them. Which is why I don't know whether
this thing in the European Parliament can succeed, but even if it
does, I'm not sure it could mean anything.

Cheers,
Valentin