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The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.
This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.
On February 14th, Valentine's Day, Free Software Foundation Europe asks all Free Software users to show their appreciation for Free Software. FSFE suggests to take this day as an opportunity to say "thank you" to one of the dedicated hard-working people in the Free Software community.
"The upcoming European parliament elections give the free software movement an opportunity to educate the candidates to the importance of protecting free software from bad legislation involving software patents, interoperability and net neutrality. The French free software association April has organized the Free Software Pact initiative, but they need your help.
The Free Software Foundation announced a project to assemble a replacement extension library for OpenOffice.org, which will list only free software extensions. OpenOffice.org is free software, and an important contribution to the free software community. However, the program offers the user a library of extensions, and some of them are proprietary.
"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution.
Free software can be viewed as sort of a public good — everyone can benefit from it. Instead of paying for complete applications, buyers may wish to only pay for specific program elements they want, which the software lacks. Therein lies an opportunity to make money on free software, instead of around it.
The upcoming European parliament elections give the free software movement an opportunity to educate the candidates to the importance of protecting free software from bad legislation involving software patents, interoperability and net neutrality. Please follow these easy steps...
Last year Russia announced an ambitious plan to use free software for all its schools. Now, it seems, things aren't going so smoothly. Funds have been cut back, faulty discs containing free software were sent out - and Microsoft is offering special deals on Windows XP...
