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

[Richard M. Stallman]

    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).

I think it is the practice of saying "open source" (rather than "free
software" or "logiciel libre") which allows this to happen.

The term "open source" represents a choice to focus on everthing
_except_ the ethical issue of freedom to share and control the
software you use.  No wonder that success in convincing someone
to convert to "open source" does not win their support for freedom.

People justify this choice by arguing that it is easier to convince
people of the open source ideas.  And it may be true that you can get
more people to take the "open source" step -- because they have not
gone very far.

And if the free software movement is hidden behind "open source", they
will probably never see anything to suggest that they go any further.