FSFE believes 1125 public administrations, advertisements for proprietary … – Netzpolitik.org

After six years, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) finished their PDFreaders campaign. The campaign began in 2009 with the idea to remove advertisements for proprietary PDF viewer software from websites of public institutions. Vorneweg contributed Volunteering 2104 “Bugs”, ie cases of direct advertisements for proprietary PDF viewer by public authorities, together and the FSFE has listed them online. Since then, hundreds of free-Softare activists were active by anschrieben the respective institutions and called for changes to their websites. FSFE has received much positive feedback from the authorities, who thanked for the letters. And until today have 1125 2104 websites (53%) revised their websites, by having removed links to proprietary PDF viewers or have added links to Free Software PDF viewers.

Here would be advertising by the government for a single automaker also inappropriate

In addition to writing letters, FSFE has also collected signatures for a petition calling for an end to the advertising of proprietary software products on government websites. 90 organizations, 63 businesses and 2731 individuals have signed this petition.

In addition, were achieved following changes at national and international levels:

• In Germany, national parties have issued opinions for free PDF viewer, and the German Government itself has the use of our text module recommended in their migration guide. The Germany Coordinator of FSFE, Max flour, has documented this in detail in his blog
• In the EU. The European Parliament, the European Commission requested directly, what are the reasons to apply special software and what steps would be necessary to resolve this problem.
• 2011 was one of our pdfreaders.org coordinators, Hannes Hauswedell, with Google in contact when he asked her, the included in its Chrome browser PDF publish viewer as Free Software. Finally, in May 2014 the pdfium sources were published, and even if the request of the FSFE will not have been the only reason for its publication, this is an important step forward for large-scale spread of PDF viewer based on Free Software.

Hannes Hauswedell, who launched the campaign and pursued a voluntary basis over the years, says:

This success would not have been possible without the help and hard work of our volunteers and the support of our donors. Thank you! While many public and private sites still apply proprietary viewer to public awareness has significantly sharpened during this campaign, and now it should be much easier to approach the rest of the sites administrators. In addition, most Internet users already use today free software when you open a PDF document in your browser – a big difference from 2009 Working course still remains to be done and we invite you, administrators to remember to use Open Standards! and to promote any proprietary software. And with your support, we will continue to fight for an Internet that respects the privacy and liberties of its users

Even after the end of the campaign: the Who advertisements for proprietary PDF readers on websites discovered public administration, may use the sample letter or write your own in order to send it to the relevant public administrations. For the follow-up, the FSFE has gathered a few tips.