The Open Parliament petition
A few weeks ago, FSFE co-launched the Open Parliament petition, along with Esoma and OpenForum Europe. Here’s a summary of why we’re asking you to sign it, and we hope you’ll point others to it.
The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for publishing data. We’d like the elected politicians to be able to choose free software and we’d like data to be published in open standards.
The online petition is not part of the official petitions process inside the European Parliament, but it is a way to show that this issue is important. On the openparliament.eu website you can see the text of the petition.
This text was written for the official internal petitions procedure of the European Parliament. It avoids technical details and it focusses on referencing related projects instead of making detailed requests. As far as I know, this is the normal style for petitions. Some studies will be done to define the details. FSFE is explicitly mentioned in the petition, so we will be involved in the process to ensure it does it’s job of removing barriers to the use of free software.
The open standards aspects are important because when the European Parliment publishes videos in proprietary formats, they are pressuring EU citizens to use proprietary software.
In March, we made a joint press release and held a press conference in the European Parliament with MEPs David Hammerstein and Eva Lichtenberger. (Old friends from the anti-swpat campaign.)
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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