Seventy European groups took part in the worldwide Software Freedom Day that was held on 19 September. That is eleven groups more than participated in 2008.
If the registrations on the festival's website are complete, this year there were no French groups participating, down from five that took part in 2008. The number of groups increased in Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. New groups registered in Belgium, Bulgaria and Hungary.
The disappearance of French groups does not worry Robert Schumann, one of the board members at the non-profit organisation Software Freedom International. The numbers simply change from year to year, he says, due to the nature of a volunteer-led community-based event.
However, he believes there is growing participation in the EU's eastern countries. "These countries have a lot of programming talent, but have not historically had the infrastructure and capital to have world-leading software companies."
Schumann says politicians and policymakers involved with digital rights and freedoms should be interested in Software Freedom Day. Software freedom is part of a wider set of digital freedoms, he says, such as the right to access public data, the right to have personal data protected and the freedom to use the Internet to access all data, not a walled garden or commercially-sponsored part of it.
Governments and politicians should listen to the message of Software Freedom Day. "This day is about people and about raising awareness of how rights and freedoms in the real world translate into the digital world."
Sustainable
According to Schumann, governments are already moving towards open source software. "They are recognising the sustainability benefits of requiring complex IT projects to be opened to inspection and to competition."
The EU is, to some extent, sticking to an older approach to IT systems, based around big budgets, big business and monolithic systems. "This means they tend to rely heavily on US-based software companies, since they managed to grow into very strong positions early on in the digital revolution."
He suggests the EU needs to bring free and open source software higher up the agenda, to reduce reliance on proprietary software produced by foreign companies and to stimulate software innovation. "They may also wish to follow developments in China, where open source is being enthusiastically promoted. We are very pleased that the government there has been an enthusiastic supporter."
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