[Fsuk-manchester] FSFE Fellowship meeting: Sept. 29th with 'Open Source Consortium'

[Sam Tuke]

The September Manchester FSFE Fellowship meeting will take place a week today 
on the 29th at 19.00 in MadLab:

http://madlab.org.uk/content/fsfe/

Gerry Gavigan will be coming from London to talk to us about the challenges of 
getting the British Government to support Free Software.

We'll discuss issues raised by the talk, before moving on to feedback from the 
DIY Feminist Festival, Richard Stallman's talk in Birmingham, and Software 
Freedom Day.

As always, please send any additional items for discussion to the Manchester 
Fellowship mailing list (address@hidden).

About Gerry's talk:

"The public sector is an IT market distorting monopsonist (the customer 
equivalent of a monopolist)

This is bad news for everyone. What are we (all of us) going to do about it?
It's about Open Standards.  Without Open Standards, whether you call the 
software Free or call it Open Source, any implementation is sitting on 
foundations of sand. 

The publication of the OGC procurement note regarding open source software in 
January had the potential to suggest that the public sector was getting 
serious.  Since then all the evidence indicates otherwise.

We need to engage with the public sector in a way they cannot avoid. Gerry 
Gavigan, chair, OSC, will be discussing ways to approach this and why he hopes 
FSFE (UK) can work with OSC on this.

If we had a member in every constituency the OSC would be able to represent 
the arguments to every MP in the country."

Kind regards,

Sam.
-- 
Sam Tuke
British Team Coordinator
Free Software Foundation Europe
IM : address@hidden
Latest UK Free Software news: uk.fsfe.org
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