FFII
support for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure
The FFII is a non-profit organisation with branches in various European countries. FFII concentrates on the spread of data processing literacy. They support the development of public information products based on copyright, free competition, and open standards.
In daily practice, FFII is the driving force of the movement which fights against the legalisation of software patents in the European legislation. This means in practice: active lobbying in the European administration in Brussels (in particular the European Parliament), distributing press releases and information, and organising conferences and demonstrations (both physically and on the web). The very comprehensive (and therefore sometimes inconveniently arranged) website can be found at www.ffii.org.
The most important persons within FFII are Hartmut Pilch (chairman) and Erik Josefsson (lobbyist in Brussels). But in addition to them a large number of dedicated volunteers is participating in many countries (Belgium, Poland, England, Sweden, Germany, ...). In the Netherlands vrijschrift.org is acting as the local representative of FFII.
In October 2004 NoSoftwarePatents.com has been set up as an active campaign throughout Europe. This has been done in a professional fashion by Florian Müller with financial backing from three IT companies (1&1, RedHat and MySQL AB). In March 2005 it was announced that FFII will take over this campaign. Whether this means that the IT companies mentioned will now support FFII financially is not quite clear --*nbsp;the campaign manager Florian Müller is stepping back to start other things.
In 2005, an ambitious plan was made for scaling up FFII's activities with respect to software patents. In essence, Hartmut Pilch expects to be able to effectively counter the very well funded pro-software patent lobby with a number of concentrated activities. However, this will push up FFII's costs significantly.
NLnet is supporting FFII's activities in 2005 with a donation of € 5.000 (bringing the total contribution of NLnet to FFII to € 10.000).