New Hampshire software freedom bill on 21 February 2023

[Leah Rowe]

Hello everyone,

I'm CC'ing this to several organisations. I ask that you all please
spread the news about this, in whatever way you can:

On 21 February 2023, there is a hearing for a bill in the New Hampshire
Legislative Office Building in Concord, New Hampshire, named House Bill
556-FN that would greatly advance the cause of free and open source
software everywhere.

The text of the bill is here:

https://gencourt.state.nh.us/lsr_search/billText.aspx?id=193&type=4

If passed, the New Hampshire Information Technology Council would then
be required, by law, to promote software freedom to the Department of
Information Technology Commissioner. This would include analysis of
practical issues such as cost, and deployment strategies for libre
systems to replace current proprietary systems; more importantly, it
would require them to study ways of reducing (or eliminating) the need
for citizens to use proprietary software for interactions with the
state. The bill also promotes the principle of copyleft licensing, such
as GNU GPL; regardless of how you feel about copyleft versus permissive
(BSD-style) licensing, the advancement of any libre software on such
massive scale will help the entire movement.

I wrote about this on the Libreboot website, today:

https://libreboot.org/news/usa-libre-part3.html

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) also published their own article, on
Friday last week:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/new-hampshire-residents-support-another-software-freedom-initiative-on-tuesday-february-21

The bill hearing is *tomorrow*. It is critical that as many supporters
of software freedom show up as possible, to testify in favour of it,
and to advance the cause of our movement.

Thank you for reading!

-- 
Leah Rowe,
Company Director,
Minifree Ltd

Registered in England, registration No. 9361826
VAT Registration No. GB202190462
Minifree Ltd, 19 Hilton Road, Canvey Island
Essex SS8 9QA, United Kingdom
United Kingdom

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