Main page of the Petitions Portal. General information, most recently uploaded petitions and further links to procedural pages. Further links to the European Parliament website.
The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.
If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.
FreeBSD is fine for servers I guess, but due that most server administrators know Linux better than any BSD, it's probably not going to be used much. BSD's also seem to be severely underfunded and the future of them seem vague.
That would be incredibly dumb. There are entire fields where the FOSS is just hilariously behind proprietary software (or sometimes the only option). Do you want to cripple public institutions by cutting them off entirely from proprietary software?
Right now public institutions are paying for proprietary software. If they would invest the same money into FOSS, the FOSS option would not be behind proprietary software for long.
I think the point is to invest the money into the continued development and improvement of the foss software instead of giving the money to businesses who shield their proprietary codebase. In theory.
Switzerland already did it. Its brilliant. Instead of the gov pouring money into proprietary solutions to meet their needs, they can fund FOSS and benefit from the same software being funded by other governments and companies too.
Proprietary is crippling. Its only chosen due to corruption
CAD, CAM, EDA, audio/video production (NLVEs, DAWs, synthesisers etc.).
There are open source options sometimes, but they are all faaar behind the commercial options. No fiscally sane business or government department would use them (unless they only need a small job, or are quite masochistic).