We, the European Pirates, support the promotion of software that can be used, analysed, disseminated and changed by everyone. This so-called free and libre open source software is essential for users' control of their own technical systems and provides a significant contribution to strengthening the autonomy and privacy of all users.

Free culture is an important resource for the education and creativity of society. We strive to promote artistic activity and cultural diversity to ensure a rich educational and artistic environment for our and future generations.

The free flow of knowledge and information is essential for us PIRATES and must be promoted and guaranteed in education. Educational institutions should increasingly use the learning resources available under a free license, and where there is no restriction of copyability.

The technical progress creates new opportunities to share knowledge and learning concepts internationally and develop them together. For increased use of these opportunities, we support free and open teaching and learning materials (OER). We are committed to the development and use of such materials. National and international OER projects are a concrete way to transform this vision into reality.

We welcome the existing EU activities in support of free teaching and learning materials and will seek to ensure that this will be continued and expanded. The availability of educational media under free licenses that are available for all is essential for barrier-free access to education, even beyond the borders of the EU.

• Support of free creators. We will preserve the contemporary free licenses and deploy them in the public sector (educational materials, photographs, documents, etc.). We will initiate the migration of the public sector to free software which doesn't have security risks rising from the hidden code and does not bring the dependency on a specific supplier.

• Education. From a long term perspective, we see innovation as the key towards the sharing and development of our cultural and intellectual wealth. We support educating citizens and students in all types of educational facilities about their right to information and about free formats and software. Furthermore, we support the digitization and publication of documents stored in public libraries and archives.

PROPOSAL 8: Mandatory use of free software in public administration [Free software and Libre Culture]

We, European Pirates, think citizens' data must be processed, managed and secured with free software tools. Free software reduces administrative costs and promotes local technical support.