We ahve one hell of a strong local M$. They've infiltrated our shools in such a way that our secretary of schooling has a _contract_ with M$ giving it a monopoly over our schools. That hurts, especially when I come to school and hjave to work either on mess dos 5.0 (ouch!) or WinNT (ARRGH!) 4. That has a ph.D. in sucking. Our goverment uses only M$ products (and we _do_ have high corruption) inside. HrOpen, a local open systems group, though considered very important, wasn't asked a single quiestion when a study about the development of Software firms was being done, and, interestingly enough, the CEO of Microsoft Hrvatska was in the comitee... OUCH!
I think that is very much a situation around the europe. At least it is in Finland - more or less. That's why I think FSFE is quite important organization. Problem really is that most of the people doesn't know anything else than Microsoft systems. That is the situation mostly because lack of organizations promoting free (or any other alternative) software at the same time when corporations like Microsoft spends millions of dollars to promote their software. I think FSFE will have good changes to turn this situation around.
That's why I see FSFE very welcome.
-M.T. -- In the source code I trust, others pay cash.