"...Sarnez, a member of the European Parliament since 1999, is currently campaigning to be re-elected to the European Parliament. She has recently pledged her support for free software, after being approached by the Free Software advocacy associations April in France and the Associazione per il software libero in Italy.

One member of the European Parliament and a handful of their advisors and assistants started a free software group last Saturday, aiming to increase the use of free and open source software in the European Parliament's IT infrastructure. The user group is open to all who works in the European Parliament, including staff and assistants working in political groups.

A member of the EU Parliament, Heidi Rühle, representative of the Green Party, has presented a question regarding whether or not Microsoft should be considered as having failed to fulfill the conditions to participate in public procurement procedures in Europe, as laid out in Article 93(b) and (c) of Financial Regulation.

On June 7, 2009, Swedish voters elected a member of the PiratPartiet (Pirate Party) to the European Parliament.
The Pirates made the copyright and patent concerns of the free software community part of public discourse for the first time anywhere, and did so using social media techniques that caught their opponents completely unaware.

On June 7, 2009, Swedish voters elected a member of the PiratPariet (Pirate Party) to the European Parliament. A second parliamentary seat will go to the Pirate Party this fall if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified and Sweden gains an additional two seats.

Binary Freedom started not long ago a campaign to promote free software and open standards on the state of Massachusetts. Government choice of software dictates the software citizens are able to use to access information and services. Please consider voting if you live in MA.

"...The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl : the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime..." -- via perlbuzz: http://perlbuzz.com/2008/02/patrick-michaud-spreads-the-word-at-fosdem.html

The newly elected European Parliament will include at least 33 members from 7 member states that have pledged their support to free software, according to advocacy groups April and the FSFE. The provisional results of their campaign show that of these, 17 come from France, 7 from Germany, 3 from the Netherlands, 2 from Italy, 2 from Spain, 1 from Belgium and 1 from Portugal.

"On June 6th the members of the European Parliament for the 2009-1014 period will be elected by the citizens of the 27 member countries. Shortly after this, the new representatives will start a new round of negotiations of the infamous Telecom package. If you are a citizen of one of the member countries, we ask you to consider the position of the different parties before casting your vote..."