some good news: today, at the "GPA Bundesforum" austrias biggest trade union addopted a motion in favor of promoting "open source".
( GPA is the (Trade Union of Private Sector Employees) and is the largest trade union in Austria. The "Bundesform" is the place where the long term strategy is decides every 5 years. GPA has about 300k Members and negotiates collective bargaining agreements for about 2 Million people in Austria.) while we had to cut some corners in the demands and formulations, all in all it is quiet a good text with a lot of important demands. so some 25 years of work there kind of payed off. of course, the main reason why we got it through was not so much our work but it was due to trump. when europeans saw the pictures of the tech giant CEOs beind trump in his inauguration they realized how unfortunate the dependence on US-software giants was. wile in the EU this realization will mainly move some of the money spent to europan proprietary software, some have realized that the dependence on closed source software is the main problem. some of the demands are: * Mandatory use of Open Source in public sectors * Tax incentives favoring free software * Open Weights: The large LLM systems were trained with the entire knowledge of humanity. It is therefore reasonable to demand that the "weights/parameters" in which this knowledge is stored in the AI systems must also belong to all of humanity. * Against the Expansion of Software Patents * Education and Training Programs * Strengthening Open Source in Research & Development * Incubator Projects with the adoption of the motion we also have a good mandate to organize internal education for trade unionists and works council members on the topic. while the motion has been adopted with a large majorty: not everyone yet understands the socioeconomic workings of free software and the downside of proprietary software. and of course: just because the trade unions want something does not mean it will become law any time soon: in austria we have a coalition government so.. if you are interested in promoting the topic within trade unions in your country get in contact with me. franz schaefer "mond". -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . Franz Schaefer GPG: 3774ECD160719558 .. +43 699 106 14 590 Fingerprint: 5025 A74A ... [email protected] 01DF F2AE 75E9 57C8 ... http://www.mond.at/ 3774 ECD1 6071 9558 _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
