1 year FSFE Fellow – 1 year deepening of Free Software in Greece
Tommorow, January 19th, I will renew my membership at Free Software Foundation Europe. Its been exactly a year since I joined FSFE and the Fellowship. This year (2010) many actions took place for the deepening of Free Software by public institutions and people in Greece:
March 11th: The Association of Greek Users and Friends of Free Software (later baptized as GNU Greece by Richard M. Stallman) became an official associate organization of FSFE. This co-operation didn’t remain as a mutual brand advertisement but it was alive and kicking.
March 28th: GNU Greece participated in the Document Freedom Day Campaign and made a Public Intervention sending an official letter to official institutions of Greece asking for the adoption of Open Document Format in Greek Public Services.
April 14th: GNU Greece announced that Richard M. Stallman accepted a speech invitation in Thessaloniki. The speech took place at the Science Center & Technology Museum of Thessaloniki, Noesis, and it was a great success.
June 30rd: GNU Greece inspired by the Bolzano LUG – FSFE action, made a Public Intervention – Complaint for a Competition by the Public Power Corporation of Greece which was not taking into account the possibility of Free Software. Unfortunately due to summer mood, there was a lack of coordination, so, this didn’t came out as a common initiative of FSFE and GNU Greece.
October 13th: GNU Greece joined the PDFreaders FSFE Campaign and personally I made a lot of submissions about Greek public institutions that advertise non-free PDF readers. This was fun because after that, in November local elections were held and I didn’t sent any letter. But when I looked back to see if there was any “debugging” I was amazed because 4 of the 15 institutions that were reported, did created links or added banners to PDFreaders Campaign website.
Some friends, but also the support of the campaign by Richard M. Stallman (see fsf-community-team mailing list) encouraged me to send the letters to the remaining organizations.
This is what I’m going to do. After what we experienced at GNU Greece, including the answer of one Greek MEP (a woman) to the March 28th Public Intervetion, I believe that yes, we, the advocates of Free Software, the FSF, the FSFE, the GNU Greece, we have a voice.