Hi all,
I recently came across this discussion about lobbying free software: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2011-08/msg00299.html
Here's a brief summary of the case: a public portuguese institution[1] has organized a composition competition[2] where the music submitted must be typeset either by Finale or Sibelius (both proprietary software). It seems that there's no particular reason behind this requirement. The organizers haven't explained why other programs are not allowed. Probably, they will publish the score of the winner and they want to be sure that the source is made by the software used by the big publishing companies. It's just a guess, as the source file is not required by the competition rules.
The developer who started the discussion said later on: "I think that it is worth it for a community of users of any free software (where I mean free in every sense of the term) to be active in contacting organizations whose rules are hostile to the free usage of software. It helps organizations learn about free software (both the software itself and the mentality of freedom behind the software), thereby encouraging these organizations to adopt policies that are conducive to this type of free-ness / free-dom."[3]
I think that a user-based action is a good thing, but I'm afraid that without some kind of guidance this kind of action won't be very effective. So I wonder if FSFE could be interested in organizing a campaign similar to the PDFreaders campaign (which I really appreciated). What I'm thinking of is a campaign which is neither too narrow nor too wide in its scope. For example, lobbying in all the competitions:
a) run by public institutions b) where free software is discriminated
What do you think? Too much hassle? What did you learn from the PDFreaders campaign?
Cheers, Federico
[1] http://mmp.cm-cascais.pt/museumusica/mmp/museu/ [2] http://mmp.cm-cascais.pt/NR/rdonlyres/5BBEE22D-3C21-4996-AEFE-A2C0B2FAF9C9/1... [3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2011-08/msg00312.html