What would you think about a sign on the highway stating “You need a Volkswagen to drive on this road. Contact your Volkswagen dealer for a gratis test drive – Your Government”? When it comes to PDF reading software, many governments do this every day. With the pdfreaders.org campaign we have turned the spotlight on governments who behave in this way, exposing how frequently such non-Free advertisements appear.
Every day, governments advertise non-free software on their websites, like the exemples you can see underneath. The pdfreaders.org bug hunt lasted from September 13 to October 17, 2010. With the help of our Fellows and of a lot of highly motivated individuals, we have collected in the meantime XXXXX bug reports coming from every countries in Europe, and also XX from outside of Europe (mainly Saudi Arabia and Australia).
Our Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Government Websites was also heavily supported with no less than XXX organizations, XXX businesses and XXX individuals.
The PDFreaders campaign is not only about spotting public institutions which behaved badly.
It is much more about raising awareness on the following issues:
The FSFE is currently contacting the institutions listed below to explain them that there are alternatives to the readers they promote, and that they should keep neutral in giving everybody the possibility to make a choice by themselves, for example in adding a link to pdfreaders.org or to single PDF readers, but never imposing one single way of reading the files, because this is protection of the oligopole of some proprietary companies.
Our democracies are based on freedoms, and this should also apply in the digital realm. Free Software garantees to the user the freedoms to use, study, share and improve the software. Since the government is here to protect people's freedoms, it should rather promote Free Software, which is the position more and more adopted in Europe toward the software procurement by public administrations. Democracy needs Free Software, and governments should not stand in the way of their development. To the contrary, they should help them integrate in the market of PDF readers.
This last point is very critical. Our definition of Open Standards requires between other things that the standard is "available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties" which is no longer the case when some proprietary businesses use extensions that make their files unreadable by any other readers.
For all of these reasons, FSFE is now asking public administrations to make people aware of the fact that there are several ways of dealing with PDF files, and that they are not locked in with the product of one single vendor. The FSFE wants them to either remove their advertising for proprietary software or to propose equal advertising for free software, to ensure its neutrality towards the Software market. If you want to help contacting the institutions, please take a look at the guideline, and write us an e-mail so that we can organize most effectively the sending out of letters.