I love it here

Just read that Germany's new IT-Council announced today that they will introduce ODF in the federal public administration. All federal public administrations should be able to receive, sent, read, and modify ODF documents until beginning of 2010. It is already published on heise and golem (both in German).

FWIW, I think the reason was not the German Bundestag decision from 5. Juli 2007 to support Open Standards -- no -- he has seen the pictures with the tart Vice-President Steinmeier got from us at DFD in Berlin ;-)

On Saturday I attended the BLIT 08 in Potsdam, which is near Berlin. Grischa organised the FSFE booth there which we stuffed with a good crew from the Berlin Fellowship group.

We explained FSFE's work, distributed leaflets about our work and sold some t-shirts. Apropos T-shirts, we have a new T-shirt which just arrived at my place on Thursday last week. I already added it to FSFE's webshop. The T-shirt shows the Fellowship logo and the German text "Mach Dich Frei!" on the front and the URL of the Fellowship page (fsfe.org) with included FSFE logo on the back.

"Mach Dich Frei" is a German pun. Its first meaning is "Free yourself", the second meaning is "Get undressed" (e.g. a German doctor would say "Machen Sie sich schon mal frei" when you have to put off your shirt).

Back to the booth. We had one new thing: Stephan (FFII) had a short real time presentation showing people how you can change a software program. He changed the menu order of the webbrowser in the source code and recompiled it. Perhaps we will use that on other events, too. Especially at events with a high number of non-programmers. As they see why it is also important for them that the source code is available and that you have the freedom to modify the program.

All in all I was happy with the event. Thanks to Grischa for the overall organisation and to Christof, Jürgen, Olaf, and Stephan for helping at the booth.

Disclosure: Yes I think the pun on the t-shirt is funny ;)