 Hello everybody and welcome to this talk on public money public code. My name is Alexander Zander and I'm FSSE's policy manager. The Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology. And these users are also governments, public bodies, administrations. So we are also working on a policy level in order to convince governments to use free software. I guess you are all familiar with the concept of free software. Still, I want to tell you more about it and about the four freedoms. So free software always comes with four freedoms. So you can use, study, share and improve it. So which means you can use the software for any purpose you want. You can study the code as it is transparent. You can share it with others through two free licenses. And you are free to improve and modify the code. This four freedoms were very, very helpful during the Corona crisis. I will tell you more about this in a minute when we talk about the tracing apps. But generally speaking, why should governments use and support free software? So I have two very good reasons for you and the first one is about digital serenity. So in order to establish trustworthy systems, public bodies must ensure they have the full control over the systems, over the software they are using. And also it's about taxpayers' money. So public bodies are financed through taxes. And so that's why they must make sure they spend the funds in the most efficient way possible and don't reinvent the wheel again and again. And especially during the Corona crisis, we have seen that there are very good reasons why governments should use free software, especially if they want to work together across borders. So I guess you are all familiar with the tracing apps which have been released in most of the countries so far. And in the very beginning there was a debate around these apps and we started to step into this discussion with three very important demands. So first of all, we said these apps have to be used voluntarily. They must respect fundamental rights and they have to be free software. For example, in order to ensure that they are respecting fundamental rights. So as for example, as I just said, the code is transparent. Everybody can see what the software does. And so this is how you can, for example, see if these apps are really respecting fundamental rights. And so we stepped in in this debate and started to convince governments and EU bodies. And yet just quickly after, we stepped in already the member states and the European Commission and the EU Health Network followed our demands and released some recommendations for common approach for these mobile tracing apps and said they have to be free software. For example, in order to make them reusable for other countries. And so this helped a lot in the debate and we've seen that it is a very good idea to share expertise across borders and to not reinvent the wheel all the time and also to have a transparent approach in order to have the acceptance by the citizens. Else I guess if these apps wouldn't be released as free software, we wouldn't have seen so many people downloading these apps, for example. So as we've seen during the crisis, there are global problems with very similar demands all over the world in different countries. And we've seen that specific hardware and specific software was needed during that time and that it was very, very similar all over the world. You maybe have seen it also during the home office time or while you were remotely working and we have seen all over the place that these global solutions comes with free software and that this is a game changer because you have the interoperability due to open standards. You have the independence through free licenses. You can collaborate, which was very or still is very important during the crisis and so you can foster innovation, you can make products better. For example, also this tracing apps and you have the acceptance, especially by the citizens for these solutions due to the transparency and as you can also involve all stakeholders possible, you can also have a very good product in the end. So we've seen during this crisis that free software is very, very helpful and a game changer, but also already before the crisis hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of people demanded that publicly financed software developed for the public sector must be publicly available under a free software license. So we started this campaign public money, public code around, we are roughly three years ago in order to convince the public sector to lease the software as free software. So code paid by the people should be also available to the people and we have, as I just said, a lot of organizations who are supporting this and a lot of individuals. So feel free to join this campaign, spread the word and even if this was a really quick talk, if you have any questions, just reach out to me, send me email and I hope you will help us in order to spread the word about free software. Thank you. Bye-bye. Hello, Alex. Hi. Thank you for your talk. It was very interesting. Thank you. Yeah, it's good also, I think, to cover kind of the big picture open source here. I think you did a really good job at that. I loved also the picture of the Berlin Wall, by the way. Thank you. It comes from our volunteer group in Berlin and I think they did a good job. So it's a nice picture. Absolutely, absolutely. It shows you that the message of the wall continues to be relevant, right? Yeah, that's true. I have a question from Ruland talking about the corona pandemic and public money should be used in the most efficient way possible. That's, of course, something I think we all agree on. A lot of the big providers during the corona crisis, they made their solution temporarily free. And yeah, I mean, of course, if you want to deploy something with free software quickly in case of a crisis like that, that's, of course, well, a much higher barrier, especially because it's hard to compete with free, right? It's kind of funny to say that when you're talking about free software, but actually these cloud hosted technologies are more free in terms of money than, of course, free software is because it's still work. Yeah, what can we do about that? And what do you think about that dilemma? I think the most important part is even if you are going to have a quick solution, then you should also consider about future dependencies and costs and so that's why it is really important that we step into debate not just about the corona app, but also on hackatons and also we released a longer part about this freeware or commercialized with a term for free software thingy. We have seen loads of providers who gave something for free, but this is not free software as it is not coming for freedoms and therefore you have to be really careful if it's really free software what they promote and if it comes with it for freedoms. You can also see a longer text on this on our website. In longer talks on this issue, I'm also addressing this issue because we've seen it a lot and we also stepped in here in debates and tried to explain what is free software and what is freeware, for example, compared to it. As you don't want to run in these vendor lock ins today, even if you need a quick solution, you should take your time even if it's taking you two or three more days to have a good solution in place. You want to have it also again running after the crisis and therefore it's really important to think about also future dependencies and vendor locks when you choose a solution today and this is not only true for governments but also for individual and companies and so yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Alright, I have one more question that we need to go to the next one and well I would say try to keep it short but that's going to be tough I think. So the question is from Jope and he asks if governments are more interested in open source and European software companies and self-hosting, I guess now privacy shield is nullified. Do you see any indication of that? Well to be honest, I mean we had the similar debate around the privacy shield three or four years ago when it was about safe harbor so it was an expected decision from the EZJ and so therefore to be honest, I think this decision by itself won't have too much influence over free software but on the other hand as we've seen during the Hackathons and also with the Corona app and the huge debate also on public television on this and in newspapers and things like this this helped a lot so because it was easy for everybody to understand the benefits of free software and they use it so and that's why this helped way more than for example a decision on the privacy shield or safe harbor this will help more in the debate around data protection but not that much on the debate of free software I guess. Alright, thank you. Hey, again thanks a lot for your talk. It was really interesting. Thanks for having me. You're very much welcome. After you we will have a talk about the Collective's app from Azure. Everybody stay tuned. Have a nice day Alex. Okay. See you, enjoy your conference.