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.
Our Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Public Institution 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:
In naming one single software or only non-free software, public institutions are promoting this software or that software model.They may well not receive any monetary compensation for it, but even in this case, this is advertising, or worse, hidden advertising. With such practices, public institutions support the oligopole of the few big PDFreaders developping companies and hinders the other to have access to the market. FSFE is calling for advertisement-free public websites, in order to preserve the free competition n that field.
In the case that public institutions still insist on proposing some solution to their citizens who want to download the PDF documents, they have to be made aware that there are loads of 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.
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.