The September Manchester FSFE Fellowship meeting will take place at 19.00 on the 29th at MadLab.
Gerry Gavigan will be coming from London to talk to us about his goals as Chairman of the Open Source Consortium.
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 (manchester@lists.fsfe.org).
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.