SFP#55: Policy and EU: Meet our Danish local group from Aarhus!

There is also a lot of discussions going on in Denmark, as you probably know, about free software and digital independency.

Could you also take us through what the FSFE local group Aarhus is doing in this regard? And yeah, basically, what's the stand there and what's the discussion all about?

Very

broad question, I know.

I know.

As you probably know, there has been some larger political issues or conflicts where I think many people in Denmark and also many politicians in Denmark, many policy people in Denmark have had a very crude awakening with Donald Trump's threats to simply take over Greenland in some form, because that was completely unprecedented.

Until now, like the gospel in the public sector among politicians, among policy advisors was all the time, you can trust the big American companies because the US are our friends.

They will always be our friends.

And just as the US government will always be our friends, so Microsoft will always be our friends.

Apple will always be our friends, maybe not Google, because there has been some skepticism towards Google, but that's quite beside the point.

But then all of a sudden, this awakening, our former best friend is actually actively threatening us, and they can simply ask, they can simply ask, a huge company like Microsoft, they could simply ask them to turn off something like Office 365 in all of Denmark.

And if they did that, the entire Danish public sector would come to a complete standstill.

So they had a kind of acute awakening and this has This has inspired a lot of discussion, a lot of interest around free software because there are these discussions, what is really needed to be in a situation where we are not dependent on what some foreign government is doing in that way in our IT infrastructure.

And we have been active in telling people that, yeah, basically we have gone out with the message called public money, public code.

And it's not a question of not being European, it's not a question of not being American, it's a question of not being free.

The problem is that the software needs to be free software so people who use it can decide what it's going to do on their behalf.

And that harkens back actually to 2023. where we had a public meeting in process meeting room, which was about saying goodbye to the tech giants, getting the tech giants out of our lives.

And since all of this happened with the Donald Trump situation, there's been a lot of interest in the public sector and a lot of intents to really do something about it.

And I know that in some ministries they are experimenting with phasing in computers with GNU Linux instead of Windows.

They are experimenting with that kind of things in many places.

I would say that in the public sector there is still not the will to start the kind of investments that would really be needed to make a major transition to free software and especially get away from something like the huge Microsoft monopoly.

But there's definitely a lot of interest about it.

And I can see that when we reach out to people like from the FSFE I can see it in my day job and actually there was also This spring or this winter there was a lot of discussion about a new digital wallet according to the new, I think there is a directive from the EU that says that people should have a digital wallet with a digital identity and the EU directive explicitly states that this should be free software.

And the Danish government at the time was creating a digital wallet, which they were actually doing as not free software.

They were actually doing it as a closed source software.