Sorry, I didn't notice the cc: to discussion. So here it is for everybody.

----- Forwarded message from Rodger Etz-Brown reb@b4mad.net -----

Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 12:53:33 +0100 From: Rodger Etz-Brown reb@b4mad.net To: fsfe-uk@gnu.org Subject: Re: UK Government Report: "Open Source - The UK Opportunity" User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.25i

I have given a presentation in front of the head of the IT directorate at the DTI in 2000.

Aim was to explain the idea of Free Software, the changes this will bring to the S/W industry and what this means for customers.

The presentation took two hours in which all DTI participants showed great interest in the matter. They were especially interested to hear about the commercial effects this has to 'their clients', i.e. S/W companies and companies using proprietary S/W.

They were furthermore interested to here what effect the widespread use of FS would have to the economy overall.

The DTI seemed to hear about Free Software for the first time in greater detail at the presentation.

I initiated the meeting as Managing Director of ID-PRO UK, which soon afterwards folded due to the collapse of ID-PRO AG in Germany. We were supposed to have a follow-up meeting where we would provide the DTI with more information.

The DTI is more interested to hear from associations that represent serveral companies rather than from a single company as they fear they would get biased information.

We also had a contact to a member of the House of Commons. That person was interested to do some lobbying for us. The first step would have been to report to an unoficial commision about Free Software. The audience would have been politicians and company owners / managers.

I am happy to provide you guys with the details of the DTI folks I have been talking to. Please mail me off the list.

For the political lobbying I won't be able to give out the information as the whole business is run by 'old-shool-ties'. We just managed to get in due to a good friend of ours that occasionally goes to visit the Blairs during their hols and watches security people playing football in their red undies :)

Tada, REB

P.S.: Excuse my spelling and the the last paragraph. I just got up ;)

On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 04:21:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

I've just been given a link to "UK fails to make the most of open source" at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23653.html by a colleague here at Luminas. Does anyone have further information on the report "Open Source - The UK Opportunity" mentioned in it? Was anyone here consulted for it?

How can we best respond to this in particular? Further discussion on the FSFE-UK list, please.

Thanks in advance,

MJR ,---------------------------------------------------- | Q. Do you need a net-based application developing, | or advice and training about web technology? | A. I suggest you try http://www.luminas.co.uk/ _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@fsfeurope.org http://mailman.fsfeurope.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussion

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