a new initiative promoted by the italian association for free software for the next italian political elections (provided that they will actually take place…). the initiative consists in asking the candidates to sign a letter where they engage themselves, in case they will be elected, to promote the use of free software through their political activity. the points proposed to the candidates are the following:

1. to foster the use of free software with the public administration;
2. to adopt free and open formats for all documents within the public administration;
3. to adopt free licences for all software produced within the public administration;
4. to assign more fund to research project based on open and free technologies;
5. to use only free software in education (schools, etc…);
6. to state the illegitimacy of software patents;
7. to contrast the development of technologies like “trusted computing”.

at present 50 candidates from 9 different parties (mainly from left and center) have signed the letter. there is also a petition that asks the new government to take some cocrete steps for the promotion of free software. the petition has been signed by 1000 persons so far.

personally i support this sort of initiatives but i think that they have very limited effects. unfortunately, obtaining a promise from an italian politician is a very easy game to play, but it never goes beyond the promises. i think a more effective initiative would be to seriously monitor what politicians actually do to promote free software, in order to be sure that our money is spent in favour of open technologies.