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Public Money? Public Code! during Corona - What role did Free Software play during the crisis
2020-11-21, 11:40–12:10 (Europe/Athens), Κύρια Αίθουσα Ομιλιών
Language: English

In a time when humanity needs to work together to find solutions for a crisis, we cannot afford to reinvent the wheel again and again. Global problems need global solutions! It is Free Software that enables global cooperation for code development. In this talk I will look at the role of Free Software during the pandemic and how governments reacted.


Already before this crisis hundreds of organisations and tens of thousands of people demanded that publicly financed software developed for the public sector must be made publicly available under Free Software licences. It is now even more important than ever before to tackle this crisis. I will present our PMPC campaign and how it helped during the crisis in order to convince governments to release tracing apps as Free Software but also what else have been on our agenda.

See also: Presentation

Alexander, FSFE EU Policy Manager, has studied politics in Marburg, Germany, and later has been an MEP Assistant in Brussels for three years and the General Manager of Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. in Berlin for four years. Furthermore he is the founder of NoPNR!, a campaign against the retention of travel data.