Please encourage your friends and colleagues to sign as well by sending them this link: http://www.freesoftwarefreesociety.org.
Below is a story from Paul Roeland, the Systems Administrator Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands).
If you would like to share your success story about switching over to free software, or how you are spreading the word about free software, please email campaigns@fsf.org.
Our organisation is about 110 people at the moment in our head office, and over the past few years we have been moving to free software. We started with the servers and are now about halfway transitioned with our workstations.
Our main motivations for doing this were:
Freedom. We want to escape the vendor lock-in, we want the freedom to tweak and adapt software for our purposes.
Spreading of knowledge. We are an organisation that strives to increase the social justice in the world. Part of that is to counteract the imbalances that exist between North and South, between rich and poor, etc. Free software offers a unique development model, based on cooperation and the idea that if we all get smarter, we all benefit, which fits very well with our ideals. Also, we oppose most of the current patent- and trade-regulations, as they unfairly tip the balance towards those that are already rich.
After all, if we tell people to drink fair-trade coffee and recycle their waste, and tell corporations to behave responsibly, we could hardly be using software from a multinational giant that uses unfair marketing tactics, now could we :-)
Cost. No matter what the "total cost of ownership" propaganda tries to tell people, we have achieved very real and very substantial savings on our software budget.
Reliability and security. We are a very knowledge-intense organisation, and a lot of our information has strategic value. We want to keep that information safe, and use for instance encryption that we can trust. That can, from the very nature of encryption, only be free software. But also the reliability of for instance our email-systems is paramount. Free software has proven itself to produce superior quality products in that area.
That's it, in a nutshell. We have been reasonably successful in our transition, the main obstacle being financial software, because, accountants and the government force you to adapt to their systems. However, we are eagerly looking to replace these with free software as well.
Paul Roeland,
Systems Administrator
Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands).