Archive for May, 2009

Free Software Action Alert – Euro Elections 2009

Monday, May 25th, 2009

The elections for the European Parliament are very close.  The action started by Manchester Free Software has been taken up by the Free Software Foundation. See the Euro Elections 2009 wiki page for a sample letter, drafted by our very own Dave Page, with explicit references to software patents and the Stephen Fry software video.

Please propagate this far and wide—the elections are not far away, but we can at least raise awareness of free software among the new MEPs.

Subject: [FSF] Free Software Action Alert!
From: Peter Brown <peterb@fsf.org>

Dear Free Software Supporter,

The upcoming European parliament elections give the free software movement an opportunity to educate the candidates to the importance of protecting free software from bad legislation involving software patents, interoperability and net neutrality. The French free software association April has organized the Free Software Pact initiative, but they need your help. In particular, candidates in the UK need to be contacted immediately.

Mark Taylor, the coordinator for the Free Software Pact in the UK, said, The current UK Government is embarrassingly behind the rest of Europe in formulating public policy on the use of free software. Across the rest of the continent we see significant adoption and political support for free software. The Free software Pact is therefore an ideal way to draw attention to the reform the UK public sector needs and the enormous cost savings yet to be realized. For too long the UK has been dependent on the relationship with proprietary software companies like Microsoft, who are hell-bent on keeping our politicians confused on this matter. If you care about this situation, and the resulting cost to our economy, society and political culture, please contact the MEP candidates in your region and ask them to sign the Free Software Pact.

Help the campaign now by visiting: http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Euro_Elections_2009 .

–
Peter T. Brown
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org

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Steven Flower, Plings (Places to Go, Things to Do) – 19th May

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Substance, a local cooperative, are working to free local government and other data so that the information can get to the people who really need it. The project is called Plings and Steven Flower will be talking about about their experiences over the past two years and their plans for the next two years. Free software and freedom of data are the goals – but they have to jump through and negotiate a few hoops along the way!

*New Location*

The meeting will take place at the usual time, 7pm, at the Lass O’ Gowrie pub on Charles Street in Central Manchester. We will be located in the back room on the ground floor. As normal, there will be people around a little earlier (probably sampling the food and drinks on offer). Their website has full details of how to get there and the fine selection of food and drink on offer.

General information about Manchester Free Software meetings can be found on our meetings page.

If you would like five minutes to tell us about something, please contact us.

Updated: The slides from this talk are now available under a Creative Commons cc-by-sa license.

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Administrative Meeting – 11th May

Monday, May 4th, 2009

The May administrative meeting will be on the second Monday of the month at the usual time and place:

The meeting is open to everyone and normally lasts about an hour. We stay around for a social meet up afterwards, so it’s a good opportunity to meet up with people and have a chat.

You can find the minutes of April’s meeting on the FSF Groups wiki. An initial agenda is also available. If you have any thing you’d like included please contact us.

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