With the our Ask your candidates
campaign, we want to encourage people to ask their politicians Free
Software related questions. To support this activity we also send out
questions to the political parties before an election, and evaluate the
answers. We already did so for the National and City Council elections
in
Switzerland,
several elections in Germany (e.g. the last one in
Berlin),
in Vienna, Austria, and I
just send out the questions for Mai 2012 election in Schleswig-Holstein,
Germany.
To make it easier in the future, I uploaded the questions we use in
Germany, as an
example.
If you want to help to make it easier for volunteers in your country to
ask questions, you can translate this
file
and send it to our translators team.
Here the questions:
- 1.a. Do you plan to promote the use of Free Software? If so, how
will you do this?
- 1.b. Do you plan to promote the interests of small and medium sized
Free Software companies; and so, how?
- 2. Non-Free Software is only modifiable with the permission of its
owner. This restriction had led to service monopolies and vendor lock-in
in both the public and private sector. Do you plan to act against
existing service monopolies of this nature?
- 3.a. Strict adherence to Open Standards in public sector ICT enables
fairer competition amongst tenderers. Do you agree with the Free
Software Foundation Europe's Definition of Open
Standards?
- 3.b. Will you work to achieve strict adherence to Open Standards in
the public sector? If so, how do you plan to do this?
- 4.a. Is your party planing to promote the usage of Free Software in
state education?
- 4.b. Does your party intend to promote the teaching of transferable
ICT skills, rather than product or vendor specific knowledge?
- 5. Many public sector organisations advertise non-Free Software on
their websites, such as
promotions for 'Adobe Reader'. What is your opinion on this kind of
advertising, and do you have any plans concerning it?
- 6.a. In Germany software is covered by copyright law and, like
literature, is therefore unpatentable. Nevertheless, patents on
software continue to be granted by patent offices. The technology
monopolies that these patents result in lead to legal uncertainty
for software companies and hamper innovation in all European
companies. What is your position on software patents?
- 6.b How will you prevent them from threatening the growth of
Germany's economy?