 So, der nächste Talk geht um ein ganz anderes Thema. Für mich war, wo ich das erste Mal davon gehört habe, da habe ich mich erstmal gewundert, weil es eigentlich total klar ist, dass man das so nicht macht, wenn man mit öffentlichem Geld Software programmieren lässt und dann am besten auch noch in verschiedenen Institutionen die gleiche Software programmieren lässt und die einfach nie veröffentlicht und quasi mit Steuergeldern eben Software kauft und sie eben den Source Code nie veröffentlicht, sondern sie quasi verheimlicht. Das habe ich noch nie so richtig verstanden, warum man das macht. Vielleicht verstehe ich es noch, aber wahrscheinlich auch nicht, weil es niemand verstehen kann. Katharina Nokun und Basanta Tappa werden uns erzählen, was es mit der Kampagne Public Money, Public Code von der Free Software Foundation auf sich hat. Ja, thanks a lot. And the next talk will be in English because this campaign is a European campaign so we hopefully reach out to many other people outside this room. Hello stream, hello video. And the Public Money, Public Code campaign is a campaign initiated by the Free Software Foundation Europe. It was launched in September 2017. Back then we built a large coalition of 31 NGOs and we published an open letter in which we criticized the status quo of how public administrations deal with this whole licensing issue. When we look at software which is specifically funded by public institutions and for public institutions. So we have this crazy situation that they have spent millions of euros for new software projects, cool software projects, but it's not licensed under free software license. So we published this open letter and in this open letter we also make a demand which is quote, dear politicians, please implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector must be made publicly available under a free and open source software license. So this campaign really targets at making free software the default setting in public administrations and we believe that having a legal framework can help to reach this goal. And when we were thinking about launching this campaign we talked to a lot of people and most of them said yes, this is a huge problem, but are you sure you want to do this campaign? Because right now we don't have a large public debate about this issue. Most people in our community agree that this is a problem, even a lot of people in public administration agree that this is a problem, but we don't have a public debate and we don't have a window of opportunity in the most parliaments. So we were discussing this but then we thought, ja, well, when we don't have a public debate, maybe it's our role to initiate this debate. And we decided to launch this campaign in September 2017 and then something impressive happens. We started with 31 NGOs and after the launch of the campaign we were bombarded with emails and calls and people said awesome, this is an awesome campaign, can we join? Ja, and right now we have 161 initiatives from all over the world that signed this open letter that said we want to be part of this coalition because in the long run maybe there will be somehow, somewhere a window of opportunity and then when we can work together with this open letter, with this community to make a change. And we have a lot of big names on this list such as for example Torprojekt or Mozilla as well. And we got also very surprising support, ja, and maybe you remember in September 2017 there was a huge public debate about how to secure public IT infrastructure against attacks and because back then there was this debate about the WannaCry incident, ja, we had the situation that a lot of institutions, even public infrastructure had to deal with this huge global attack and we had also this debate how could a secure infrastructure look like for the critical infrastructure and ja, some of our communities said ja, well maybe use more free software could be a solution. So Edward Snowden said ja, sign this campaign to all his followers, which was very cool for his campaign and he send us a quote, which says, quote, right now the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a free software requirement, free referring to public code availability, not cause, we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital. And the last sentence of this quote refers to the situation in Great Britain after WannaCry, ja, there were hospitals which could not operate because their infrastructure failed, ja, and so this quote makes clear that this is not only about transparency, cause and so on, this is also about how to secure public infrastructure against attacks and also of course back doors maybe from, ja, other secret services or others. But we did not only had a lot of support from ja, NGOs initiatives from all over the world, but ja, I'm happy to announce that I guess this week we reached 20,000 signatures for our open letter and I'm very happy about this because it's very interesting to read or to scroll through the comments and to see why people signed this open letter. Ja, you can leave a comment there and I just looked through the comments and actually there are very interesting points which were also reasons why we launched this campaign in the first place. For example, one comment from Germany states says that open source leads to more security and more innovation. Both are desperately needed in the public space. Ja, and this argument of more or better innovation processes through free software is really something that we experience or this argument is heard a lot when we talk to people from public administration because imagine the situation, you have city A and they maybe have a cool app and they are city B and they say, ja cool app, we want to use it as well and maybe we want to enhance it with a new feature and we would be totally happy to share it. But if this app is not under a free license then it's really difficult to go through all these formal processes of doing so. And another user from Sweden commented, quote, this is how we get transparency, good quality and healthy IT investments. Ja, and this transparency argument is very important as well because some time ago, I think also a year ago we had in Germany this incident with the software PZWAL. It was an election helping tool for administrations to count together the votes of a region, a specific region in Germany and the CCC found that this the software has very severe security problems and also the software was of course not open source. This was a black box kind of and so this example shows that it's also very, very important for public institutions in their critical infrastructure for democracy to have a certain transparency that we can prove that the software actually does what it should and not something completely else especially when it comes to election or other things. And in other comments came from Norway, from a user from Norway and she wrote that I think taxpayer money the government spends on developing software should be open sourced so the taxpayers can benefit from it. And this is an argument we hear a lot when we talk to people from civil society who says yeah maybe sometimes there is a nice cool software, a nice app we can maybe use in other contexts and maybe also hear the innovation aspect if we have a nice enhancement so why can't we just use the app enhance it and share it then again with public institutions. Yeah and another comment which really made my day when I read it or I discovered it in the list of comments says we need to go to space with a useful software and astronaut must be able to fix his or her own software at Starship think about it. And the interesting fact is that actually the NASA and the ESA the European Space Program they use a lot free software and they publish everything they develop for themselves in the open so they really believe that there is no security problem with free software the contrary is true because they say when we publish it in the open then we have checks and balances we can discover security flaws faster we can fix it and we also benefit from this large community and I think today if you want to launch like a space program to Mars or to the moon or whatever you can't do it without Linux it's completely impossible but we were also extremely happy about the growing support from public administrations actually we have also some institutions some government institutions or some local regions that said we support this open letter they even signed it such as for example the Zamtgemeinde Elbmarsch from Germany or the city of Barcelona and they even publically announced that this is our official policy we want others to follow this example because we are actually already in our region so in the last months we communicated with this campaign a lot on conferences and we got a lot of very positive feedback from people especially from politics and the public administration and they say we really like this idea we want to push it maybe someday we can also sign this open letter but we need help we need help from you for example advice what are the lessons learned from existing cool free software projects in the public administrations and how can we use this as arguments or what are example good arguments I can present to my local representative easy to understand arguments for maybe people who are not in the IT or not expert on this topic and do you have maybe anhand them over and another comments we got quite often was what are from your point of view the best practices in Europe or worldwide we can show to decision makers it's much easier to argue that please change your policy or please try it at least in this one project because there are plenty of other cities who are already doing this and it works it is a trend, it is a success story and because if you don't present these best practices or these use cases then people might think ok it's science fiction and you think it should work but in reality maybe it's not so there are a lot of cool use cases and it's important also to name them some months ago at the Free Software Foundation to take all these questions and comments that followed the launch of the campaign and make a publication out of it, a publication that answers all these questions and this publication was released last month it's called Public Money Public Code Modernizing Public Infrastructure with Free Software and it's specifically made for decision makers and politics and public administrations who haven't even heard of Free Software or think of Free Software it's like Reware, no it's not and so really to explain a lot and to show that it actually works and this concept is already a success story and of course this publication was published under Creative Commons license and you can download it or order it at fsefe.org so what's the content of the brochure we decided that of course we could write all the texts by ourselves but why should we do this there are so many experts from many different fields such as from science or maybe also from public administrations or other institutions that can share their experience with the existing Free Software projects in public administrations and for instance we had an interview in this brochure Francesca Brier from the city of Barcelona and she said also something very interesting in this interview she said that now we have 3000 companies that work with us over 60% are small and medium sized companies and of course most of these companies come from the region of Barcelona and this is a very important argument for some politicians or some parties to support your local IT community or local companies instead of maybe large corporations which in the end want to lock you in in their business model and another best practice we present in our brochure there are actually true texts about this comes from Switzerland, from Bern in Bern there was this interesting case in 2011 the Swiss Federal Court decided that they want to manage a court management system called Open Eustizia and a lot of people liked it a lot this idea of going open but there was this small company from Bern which was called Web Law and they said yeah we don't like this idea because we argue that publishing software by a government institution distorts the market you could argue maybe they wanted to sell their products and now see this is a problem for our business model but in the end unfortunately this argument of a small company triggered a debate in Switzerland and some politicians from some party actually believed in this and we're not sure can we still publish free software should we not do this, how is the legal situation unfortunately in Switzerland we have a very nice group of parliamentarians which is called PAL-Diggy it consists of around about 50 members of different parties from different parliaments in different regions in Switzerland and they work on digital sustainability and they said okay we need to enter in this debate and present some arguments some facts why we still should go open and we not only should maybe take these arguments of a small company serious but in fact we should go more open and they asked Professor Dr. Simon Schlaury to do a legal study like what's the legal situation can we publish free software without distorting the market and he found in this research something very interesting not only he said yeah this is not a problem but he said an exclusive focus on closed source software could violate the principle of competition neutrality and this is a very powerful statement because when you do the statement you say okay you distorting the market if you say free software we don't want any free software here because a fair competition includes all the participants even the ones who say there is a business model for you where you don't get locked in so this example is very a powerful example because it shows that it's worth fighting for better legislation and in the end it could happen that we win and right now we have a situation that the city of Bern which is the second largest region in Switzerland publishes a lot of free software actually free software to manage child care funds and there are a lot of more free software projects in the pipeline so we are very hopeful that the future is brighter than the past and yeah next Basanta Tapa will present some of his findings he also wrote a contribution for this brochure yes thank you Kata for introducing the campaign and the publication of public procurement of free software so government buying or ordering free software which is actually what my contribution is about because yes you would expect there to be much more use of free software in government because many European countries actually have some kind of strategy papers or guidelines in place fostering or asking for more use of free software in government but it's not happening and I try to try to explain this to you by looking at the perspective of government and then the perspective of free software companies so in my opinion there are four main factors that lead to government not buying or using free software and if you're a government institution and you're trying to procure something you're trying to buy something there are certain requirements that are meant to keep a level playing field everyone gets the same chance and there are some rules for example there are minimum requirements for the size of a company or for the age of a company which are actually meant as safeguards against companies going bust bought a new software and the next month the company actually producing the software goes bankrupt it's a bad situation this regulation is meant to prohibit this but of course it doesn't make much sense with free software and it actually keeps free software from being adopted because as we heard from Francesca Bria as well most of the free software companies in Europa are small and medium enterprises so this is something that's not exclusive to free software but it's just a side effect of a regulation that's hindering small and medium enterprises from bidding in public tenders and there's also the procurement procedures are sometimes quite tedious in some countries you have to fill out long questionnaires or what's your company, what's your product sometimes you need certain certificates for example on labor standards and where is your material source and all this kind of stuff and if you're a small and medium enterprise it can be quite a hassle to actually fill out these questionnaires get those certificates especially if you're there's no guarantee that you will actually win the contract and you will be compensated for your investment in going through all of these procedures so that's number one actually buying free software then there's a very very important factor that's the lack of understanding for free software in government so some people in government of course understand free software many don't I've personally had situations where people in public procurement offices obviously they're mistaking freeware and free software I've had a nice comment where someone said to me so you expect us to use software that some kid in Finland is programming to fulfill our legal obligations towards citizens so they will be totally irresponsible of us to have amateur software in such a sensitive area so just to get into the mindset if you see it from this perspective of course it's totally irresponsible because they don't understand that they could actually pay a professional company to produce this free software and not necessarily some kid in Finland who might also be very talented and very good at what he does and also that's the classical issue of IT security so the argument of course goes how can open source be safe or secure if you were able to look at the code you can find all the weak spots you can find all the back doors so by nature if it's open source it's less secure which is of course government always wants to go the secure way so there needs to be more understanding education in government before we see more adoption then there's also the issue of procurement goals of course government there are lots of goals behind public procurement but to keep it simple the number one goal in public procurement is legal compliance so when government is buying something their main concern is to buy it in a way that's legal and no one will sue them after that as the Swiss company the Weplaw company did so that's the number one concern and everything else is secondary so if you have some kind of national strategy paper saying well it would be nice if you also bought more free software you'll be like yeah, we'll get to that later first of all let's try to do it legally compliant and a second aspect is that public procurement offices are usually service providers for other government offices so their main concern is if some government office says well could you get us this software they will just try to get them that software if it's available on the market in a legally compliant way instead of going other ways, there are of course procurement instruments such as functional tenders where you're basically saying I, the government have a specific problem and I will buy any solution, reasonably priced solution that solves this problem which is a good way for free software to get into this market instead of the procurement office saying we need this product, it has to have these specifications and use these file formats and then you're basically already saying I'm trying to buy Microsoft office here and then there's the strategic perspective which is also an issue it's actually well government has a long established tradition of using proprietary software, they use to this, they know how it works and they shy away from the switching costs of going away from SAP software also applies if you switch to free software solution is probably yes involving switching costs and I guess this is a very wholesale statement but if you take a long run perspective so you're not just looking at the switching cost which might be very high in the first year but if you look at it in the long run and especially if you adopt free software across government it's probably the same price or even cheaper to switch to free software but then you need to have this kind of long term perspective which is an issue in public procurement and of course I said if you switch across government this is also a problem in Germany we've had a few cases where local government that were actually using open office for example after a few years switched back to Microsoft office because they said well our colleagues in other cities they can't open our files where's the interoperability here we're going back to the established solution so you need a lot of coordination to actually have everyone in government switch to avoid these interoperability issues so let's switch to the free software companies perspective what can free software companies do maybe to alleviate these kind of troubles well of course they can become big and old to fulfill the procurement requirements and this of course can also mean merge or maybe form alliances for example in France there's a number of larger free software companies that also have better access to government it can also mean having more endurance for these tedious procurement processes someone has to take the grenade if no free software companies bids on these public procurement processes or tenders on these public tenders then there's no surprise that government doesn't buy the free software another issue of course lobbying so there are in many european countries there are actually procurement regulations that make it hard for free software to access because these rules were written in times where it's basically everything was proprietary software or basically what government used was all proprietary software so there needs to be some kind of organized voice saying you need to change those laws you're actually distorting competition it can also mean writing guidelines for how governments can actually procure free software in a legally compliant way in the existing regulations which is something that has happened in a few countries and public administration were quite thankful because they're always looking for the safe way and if you're giving them one it makes it easier for them but you need some kind of business association to do this and as a final point bit of a provocation that's also the issue of a certain degree of arrogance in the free software community who stands as basically I'm back, okay so Sawardage History will prove us right we know our IT you government guys, you're old fashioned you don't know your IT, ha ha look at you you don't even know what free software is and I think that's a problem because actually there's quite a lot of common ground between government and the free software community they have similar goals government also wants to avoid lock-in situations because they're costly and they're also very much interested in sovereignty and also digital sovereignty they don't want to be dependent on private companies telling them what they can or can't do so what we need is because we see his arrogance there's lack of understanding we need more communication between these two communities and I think this publication is a good first step and we need more of that and yes, I can just ask all of you guys to recommend this publication to your local government so they can also see the light thank you very much any questions, yeah, there's one as you say free software I must ask you what kind of free software you mean because just to compare GPL and AGPL as we are today in service everything end up in with the service and I could think in GPL that would use by Google close server and given to people with the service of search without people knowing what that search is I just close the cycle AGPL will allow to know the code of the search when you would want it as you should have it when you have it in GPL the point here that if we talk about the public we must understand that mostly there is the business of service and therefore the free software should be service oriented free software and that is AGPL not GPL so what you think about it yeah, this is a very specific question and yeah, I think I don't know if I understood you right you were talking also about Google yeah, so the free software foundation uses the definition of free software which also we free software foundation Europe and the FSF share the same definition which says that free software our understanding of free software is software with four freedoms and not restrictive licenses so we have an official list of what kind of licenses we see as free as in our definition and yeah, but I really think that of course we could debate about what is the best free software license this would be another talk of maybe eight hours and yeah, but still I think yeah, there is this list what we regard as good licenses but we still think that the first step is that they at least consider free licenses at all yeah, this is the main problem after that you can argue what is the best free license for your purpose and we highly recommend also public administrations to use established licensing models and not like to reinvent a new one which is also a common problem but it is difficult for others to see what does this new license mean the mic doesn't work anymore so here is another question one question about the publication is the publication only available in English so you have translations in the different countries of the remaining members of the European Union yeah, this is as an NGO this is also always a matter of funding we decided that we want to get this out in English so that maybe other are able to translate it and we are right now discussing to make translations in two or maybe three other languages yeah, but it's not decided yet and also we need to see how much funding we have to do it but yes, we are definitely considering it especially because yeah, reading a long brochure in English is difficult for some institutions and there is another question have you considered pushing for the open source software in context of the security debate, what you way and others whether the public bodies think about banning the procurement rules to exclude certain vendors or to have a strategic approach to procurement or to choose other software vendors or to have rules that force open source or the publication of code for certain hardware yeah, of course this is the IT security aspect is a very important point especially when you talk about critical infrastructure and we also have one text in this brochure specifically about this like no free software is not insecure because hey, look at all these large companies which would not exist without free software and when there was this huge debate about PZWAL in Germany also the CCC actively pushed this campaign they said like okay, here is the problem this is the solution as you said act more strategically like what are our interests okay, our interests are maybe autonomy and so on and not having backdoors in our software so this is the way you need to go and I think also this we need more partners to lobby for this and I also think this is a very powerful argument especially when you talk to conservative parties which think like oh okay free software is maybe about community and sharing and we are not sure if there is a Finnish hacker who is programming this but the security aspect is really something like people start listening to you okay are there any other questions okay then thank you a lot yeah and if you want there are some of the brochures and also some books from the FIT you can take if you want