A01327
Articles : GovernmentViva Software Libre!
In 2002, then-U.S. ambassador to Peru John Hilton delivered a threatening letter to the Peruvian congress on behalf of a powerful American special interest. The letter stated that the Microsoft Corporation and its chairman Bill Gates disapproved of Peruvian politicians debating a proposed law, Special Bill 1609, which favored the use of free software in its government ministries. Hilton warned its passage would harm U.S.-Peru relations. The bill was quietly dropped after then-Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo was invited by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates to personally receive a donation for a Toledo controlled Peruvian foundation.
This incident was an early salvo in a brewing international conflict. As developing nations around the world increasingly turn to free software to cut costs and promote local development, powerful North American commercial interests have responded by outright bullying. Sometimes they have done so by proxy, using public servants like Ambassador Hilton. Other times they have threatened legal action to intimidate outspoken critics such as the president of Brazil’s National Institute of Information Technology, Sergio Amadeu da Silviera, who compared Microsoft’s business practices to that of drug dealers. Sometimes they have threatened governments directly, such as last November (2004), when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threatened to sue Asian governments who choose to use free software.
Free as in freedom
The term “free software” refers to a burgeoning social movement which promotes the right of users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software without restriction. The software itself may cost money to purchase, but the user is then “free” to modify and distribute it. Free software is often confused with the related “open source” software movement, which uses free software methods for writing software, but is not as directly concerned with users’ rights. Both free and open source commercial software use commercial software licensing to grant rights to others. By contrast proprietary commercial software often uses software licensing as a means to explicitly deny users the right or ability to modify software to fit their needs or access their own data, the right to speak about the functionality of the software they purchased, or to resell it to others when they no longer wish to use it.
While both free and proprietary forms of commercial software have co-existed in the past, what has made certain private North American commercial interests respond directly in Latin America is that many nations there have chosen to promote the use of free software in public administration. There already is a long history for the support and use of free software in Brazil by the Workers Party, starting from the days when they controlled the state government of Rio Grande do Sul and instituted private/public sector partnerships through projects such as procergs. Most recently the government of President Luiz Lula Da Silva has chosen to use free software solutions built around GNU/Linux exclusively in a project to make computers available to the poor, as recommended by MIT last month (2005).
Free software in public administration is not only about software for special government programs such as digital inclusion for the poor. This is a battle about the purchase and use of all software by national governments and the terms such software will be provided under. This is about the procurement of servers and database applications used to house government data. This is also about the software that will be purchased and used on the desktops of government office workers every day, and whether they will continue to purchase and use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office under the terms of a monopoly supplier, or free software alternatives such as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.
The free software advantage
One reason that free software is being promoted by Latin American governments is initial cost. Brazil alone expects to save over $1 billion annually through the use of free software and elimination of costly license fees. Many other Latin American governments are also keenly aware of the cost benefits of free software. Peru and Argentina have tried passing special procurement laws to increase the adoption of free software in government. In Venezuela, the use of free software in public administration is now supported directly by President Hugo Chavez.
While it is true that the total cost of using software is not represented in the purchase price or license fees alone, free software offers the potential for significant long term cost savings for other reasons as well. Commercial free software will often work using older hardware rather than requiring new hardware to be purchased. And since proprietary commercial software publishers depend on the number of licenses they can sell, proprietary software publishers desire to make it necessary to sell as many licenses as possible for performing a given workload. It should therefore come as no surprise that the same workload that can be done, for example, with fewer systems running free software solutions, than may often be required with proprietary commercial solutions.
Free software also can result in lower costs through the absence of monopolies. One cannot have a monopoly in free software since there can always be another free software publisher that can supply the same goods at a lower cost. This is one of the main reasons why governments prefer using free software instead of proprietary commercial software: When money is spent on proprietary software, only a small proportion of that money goes towards funding useful services and software development, as a large part ends up as monopoly rent to the shareholders of the proprietary software company. In the world of free software, there are no monopolies, so money that is spent on free software is good for creating jobs and other local economic benefits. In Latin America money spent on proprietary commercial software serves mainly to make already-rich foreign software publishers even richer.
In trying to create a market for free software, many Latin American countries have used procurement laws, which determine how a government purchases goods and services. Government procurement is often done through the use of competitive bidding, whereby multiple suppliers can offer alternate and compatible products from multiple suppliers, and the government is then able to choose the best product at the lowest cost. Propriety commercial software, by its very definition and through the rights it takes away from users, is software which can only come from a single supplier.
Free software also provides oportunities for Latin American citizens to produce and directly participate in the worldwide commercial software market, rather than depending exclusivily on foreign suppliers. In doing so, free software offers incentives for forming a local software industry that can then compete on an equal basis with that of any other advanced country in the world. Commercial software development does not require expensive plants or high capital investment to develop, nor does it destroy the environment.
Commercial software development may only require people who are free to use their skills and natural talents. Certainly, the nations of Latin America can and do produce people with such talents and skills. Free software means these people can practice these skills for their own benefit and the benefit of their society as a whole without having to look for work in or migrate to foreign lands. By choosing to procure free software, the national government can directly encourage this.
If Latin American countries choose to create an economic environment that accepts participation by free software, existing corporations do not have to be excluded. Companies like Microsoft could choose, for example, to change the way they license their existing products. They are also free to adapt and offer services based on existing free software already in the marketplace. Instead of competing in these new markets, some companies have responded by trying to make it impossible for Latin American governments to choose and use free software at all.
The new banana wars
North American corporations have relied on the World Information Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to promote treaties which favor corporate exploitation. The WIPO is often used to promote treaties and laws which export both pharmaceutical and software patenting to developing nations. Private corporations then using these same treaties to enforce existing North American patent monopolies, preventing the development of competitive local industry. In addition, the “Free Trade Area of The Americas” (FTAA) treaty contains an IP rights chapter which similarly benefits North American software giants.
One way Latin American countries have responded to WIPO, and other patent bearing treaties, has been to band together with other nations to promote a specific development agenda as ratified last October (2004) by the WIPO general assembly. Yet powerful American and European commercial interests have chosen to use the WIPO chair to explicitly bar NGO’s representing the interests of developing nations from attending or participating in WIPO discussions on this development agenda, even those organizations already duly certified and recognized with observer status.
Last century, several Latin American nations were invaded by U.S. marines in the so-called banana wars to prop up the interests of North American corporations like United Fruit. While last century’s bullies came with tanks and guns, the bullies of this new century come with laws and treaties that restrict what people can do and who will be permitted to innovate to a tiny few. The right to innovate is not a privilege restricted to a tiny minority. It is not even a right exclusive to the question of free software alone, but is a basic right every citizen must be free to enjoy.
Posted by alexander
I have visited the slums of San Paulo, and I have seen the northern lights from the Lapland's, rather than exploring the world between CNN and FOX, as many of my countrymen do. The reference to Alexander has much to do with the quest for knowledge throughout the known...
By free software, you mean pirated software, not open source.
No, he means free software like Linux, instead of proprietary software like Windows. He means OpenOffice, instead of MS Office.
Keep in mind there is also free softwae that isnot open source, butit appeared in this article, that “free” meant open source.
This infor was all hashed over by wired magazine a few months ago. but no mention of the grokster decision?
Free software
‘Free’ as in ‘free enterprise’ or in ‘free speach’
The free in free software refers to the freedom garaunteed the users of the software.
Free software cannot be pirated the way proprietary software can be. If you download something like GNU/Linux you get a license to use the software in the form of the GPL. You are licensed to distribute as many copies as you want.
If you want to end software piracy, then use free software.
Every copy is a legally licensed copy. No legal worries. No indemnification needed.
Now some commercial software companies have stolen copyrighted free software code and put it in their closed source products. This kind of piracy has happened. Once they break the rules of the license the closed source software vendor no longer has the permission of the copyright holder to use the copyright holder’s code. The proprietary software company is in violation of copyright law. The proprietary software vendor has become a pirate!
In the US these software companies have all settled before being dragged into Court for their violations of copyright law. In Germany one tried to fight, but lost. These pirate corporations want to overturn the GPL, but that would probably take a constitutional amendment in the US. They would have to destroy the copyright to do what they want.
I don’t think Disney will let them.
Open office kicks ass. That free shareware has come out that easily rivals microsofts spendy office makes me grin. Once it really eats into MS profit my grin’ll get a whole lot bigger.
While I’m into the subjecct of this article, the forum posts below make it pretty clear that the use of “free software” needs a far more clear definition, given how many varieties of current development are in a sense ‘free.’
“The term “free software” refers to a burgeoning social movement which promotes the right of users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software without restriction. The software itself may cost money to purchase, but the user is then “free” to modify and distribute it. Free software is often confused with the related “open source” software movement, which uses free software methods for writing software, but is not as directly concerned with users’ rights.”
Huh?
I’d love an example of ‘free software’ that you have to purchase, but then are free to modify… Even if you license something, like a graphics engine for a game, I suspect that your rights in terms of modifying it are pretty limited. This isn’t to be confused with Customizing, which would be something like putting your logo in the toolbar of FireFox, or building your own database in FileMaker Pro.
When it comes to software it’s quite a stretch to lump “run, copy, and distribute” in with “study, change and improve” – the first set requires only a binary (think .exe, or .app if you run OS X), while the second set requires access to the source code.
There are lots of applications that are free to run, copy and distribute, usually the only stipulation is that you give the author credit. This arrangement is commonly referred to as ‘freeware.’ Stuffit Expander, Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player and many other apps are free to run, copy and distribute.
They are also proprietary, or ‘closed source.’ This means you can’t look at the code, let alone modify it. To even try is now illegal under Clinton’s DMCA. Besides, there is no easy or straight forward way to get from the .exe file back to the code that it was written in. In order to tweak or examine the innards of a program, you need access to the source code. That code is the secret, and is how these companies make their $$$. How does Stuffit make a 150kb jpeg into a 100kb .sit file? You’ll never know….
Which brings us to OpenSource. Here the software is not only free-of-charge to run, copy and distribute, but the actual text written in order to create that program is available to all.
Linux is at the root of this, though not all open source software is Linux only. Now it’s true that some Linux distros make $ by offering a CD copy, manual, and pretty box and charging for the packaging, but the actual software is also available for download free of charge. These companies make $$$ off of support and custom development contracts. This is the space where OpenSource meets Commercial.
Take databases for example. OpenSQL is an open source database suite that is considered robust, reliable, fully featured and secure. But it is by no means simple to set up. So while the software it self is free, you’ll still have to spend $$$ to get your companies database up and running. Compare this with Oracle, where you will not only have to pay a ton to have someone setup your database, but you’ll have to shell out a ton of loot for the software too. And while Oracle is by it’s nature very very very customizable, you most certainly cannot view their source code.
Most OpenSource software is licensed under the GNU & GPL, which states that you can modify and re-publish to your heart’s content, but that all derivative works must also be free of charge and published under the GNU/GPL. It’s a lovely plan and it seems to be working pretty well. As the author points out, unscrupulous corps that try and profit off the donations of others have found themselves defeated legally.
To say that OpenSource is not concerned with User’s rights, is, well, wrong. The whole movement is obsessed with users and with developing SW that is not only free-of-charge, but useable and secure. OpenOffice is a good example of this. The GPL is the user’s bill of rights.
OpenSource is basically the most rockinest form of free software around, and while the author goes to pains to distance his ‘free software’ from this movement, it is exactly the development paradigm that provides the many benefits he extols.
‘Freeware’ is usually at least one of the following :
a) a player for a proprietary media type that requires payment to develop,
b) a scheme for gaining market share (an important part of a too)
c) tiny special purpose utilities, like putting address books on iPods or whatever
d) painfully amateurish, like little games, or whatever
If someone else has any additional categories of free software – other than ‘freeware’ and ‘open source’ I’d love to hear about it….
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In the context of developing countries OpenSource software is by far the best platform to work from – in the respect the author is dead on.
Still, partially because of the obtuse use of ‘free software’, I found it all a little confusing…
Here’s my take:
Reason 1) Security
Aside from the deluge of viruses and malware that pollute the Windows environment and the intrinsic security issues that arise from having you office turned into a hive of spambots, there are the conflicts between National Security and Intellectual Property. It’s the same problem that caused our own US DoD to move toward abandoning a Windows based system – who want’s Bill Gate’s finger on The Button (that launches all the nukes)?
One of the main but less understood arguments of the M$ AntiTrust case was the issue of secret APIs (application programming interface).
[a quick comp sci lesson – an API gives programmers access to the OS’s functions, a good example is drawing a window, your OS will have a command that programmers can call and it will draw a window of the size they ask for… other API commands are things like Get_Mouse_Input or Detect_USB_Device… This way each program doesn’t have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so to speak.. I digress…]
So anyway, companies like WordPerfect complained that while M$ gave them access to APIs, M$ has a secret set of much faster APIs that only M$ programmers could use. This meant that no matter how smart or clever the folks at WordPerfect were, Windows would make sure that Word was always faster than WordPerfect.
If M$ pulls that kind of shit, whose to say that they don’t have a secret backdoor into every Windoze install on the planet? If you are in the military, you have to assume that they do, since the windows license makes it clear you can’t look under the hood, no matter who you are.
So governments that don’t want M$ all up in their private biz shop elsewhere. While lots of people my hype their love for OpenSource as the The People’s Software, and my truely resent shipping all that loot into Bill Gate’s swimming pool full of currencies, a very real issue is that nobody trusts M$ to not have a boobytrap and backdoor into Windows.
Reason 2) Educational & Economic Development
This reason seemed to be what the author was getting at. OpenSource (though not other kinds of free software) by nature of the fact that one can read through it and actually figure out how it works, helps young and emerging geeks get smart and avoids the wheel re-inventing issue that I mentioned earlier. Smart people make for more vibrent and lootful economies.
“Free software also provides oportunities for Latin American citizens to produce and directly participate in the worldwide commercial software market, rather than depending exclusivily on foreign suppliers. In doing so, free software offers incentives for forming a local software industry that can then compete on an equal basis with that of any other advanced country in the world.”
Statements like that just really confuse. If it’s free, than it’s not helping you that much on the world commercial market. On the other hand, if you have been studying the ins-outs of Linux for a few years, you are far more prepared to author profitable code than if you’ve wasted your life studying how not to do things and getting an MCSE.
The economic benefits come mostly from the lack of capital flight. You pay local consultants instead of putting IBM and Oracle guys up at 5 Star hotels. Your local guys pay taxes, buy goods and service in you local economy. Yippee. Truth is that you local consultats will ultiamtly end up doing an inferior job, and take more time to do it, but in actaully $$ you will have still payed them less than the imported labor. Plus, you local talent will gain skills, which helps a lot in the long run.
“Commercial free software will often work using older hardware rather than requiring new hardware to be purchased. And since proprietary commercial software publishers depend on the number of licenses they can sell, proprietary software publishers desire to make it necessary to sell as many licenses as possible for performing a given workload. It should therefore come as no surprise that the same workload that can be done, for example, with fewer systems running free software solutions, than may often be required with proprietary commercial solutions.”
This on the other hand is just so wrong. Especailly that last sentance. It’s just complete bullshit. The opposite is usually true, in fact. What is this workload? Maybe, just maybe if it’s just a pretty typewriter you want, that could be true. But if you want to do anything with media, or databases, or computing, it’s not.
What determines the min specs for the hardware you need to perform a task are 3 factors –
1) the complexity of the task (sending email vs. predicting the weather);
2) the number of simultaneous users/actions you want to support (10 emails/hr or 10,000)
3) the language the code was written in and the intelligence of the programmer – if you use a very high level language like Java, or Virtual Basic, you end up with fat, bloated code. If you get into the nuts and bolts of it, you can optimize much more…
for example, the Xbox and PS2 can create ass kicking graphics w/ a 733mhz Pentuim3 and old skool GFX card because the madd code monkeys at EA have been locked in the basement tweaking the code for max efficiency since the day they got their hands on one. On the other hand, download a freeware game then launch the activity monitor on you computer. You’ll be amazed to see that a Java version of Battleship takes about as much CPU power as Firefox.
That said, the license to workload equation is just BS. Take Adobe Photoshop for example. As hard as the OpenSource guys have tried, 10 users on GIMP can’t keep up w/ one experienced Photoshop designer on pretty much any graphics related task, other than maybe resizing. When it comes to usability and efficiency, my experience is that you get what you pay for. Workload / Workstation ratios go up when users are well trained, and when software is well designed. Being ‘Free’ in and of it self does nothing to increase either of these factors. What does is having smart, even gifted people who understand psychology designing interfaces. Most of these people are very busy working for Apple and have little time to donate.
In terms o being able to utilize out of date hardware, the key is to either use out of date software (many many many companies still run Office 97 on windows 95 – if it ain’t broke, why fix it? It’s not like new versions of Office have offered that many compelling features) or only ask the puter to do really simple things. A PC from 1997 will still make a deecent linux based mail server, provided you aren’t trying to pump 1,000 emails an hour through it. A smart team of guys could probably rig it so that 5 or 6 of those old skool boxes worked together to handle all that mail, but then in the end (after you pay the geek team to figure all that out) you haven’t saved that much $ over just buying a new $500 PC that could handle that load no problem.
While I understand and sympathize with the authors Marxist tendency to condemn all free market solutions, the truth is that the market does an at least ok job in this realm. Crappy software doesn’t last long. Well crafted software does well. It’s pretty artistic in this sense. And business owners and software users aren’t total sucker either. Nobody is ever going to buy 2 new computers to do a job that one was doing before. While per user licenses are often used to sell software, the models are pretty flexible too – and site licenses are almost always available. Market share and ubiquity lead to higher profits than manipulating and jerking around your customers. Photoshop users started looking elsewhere for batch processing functions (doing the same thing over and over to a bunch of files, like resizing) so in the next version Adobe had it right in there. If that hair brained workload scheme the author suggested was true, Adobe would have offered it’s batch capabilities as a seperate, expensive app. Instead they rolled it in, and threw in ImageReady for free to compete in the photoshop lite market as well.
So, the advantages in OpenSource, at this stage of the game, are not to be had at the workstation and user experience level, if anything you sacrifice efficiency and capability for the sake of developing long term skill pools and capacity. I think this is a wise maneuver for organizations on the scale of governments and so forth. Nothing would make me happier than to se opensource mature to the point where al the best software is free – but it’s not anywhere near that point right now.
Of course it’s not the job of gov’t policy to do things the most efficienct way by any stretch of the imagination, but to plot for the greatest long term well being of it’s citizens. OpenSource is clearly that path for all developing nations.
The free software definition I use is essentially the same one used in special bill 1609, and can be found here, and refers to free, in the same way as one may think of free as in speech. A primer on free software and open source can be found here. Of course, if you go to the OSI site, the definitive guide on Open Source, you can find how Bruce Perens originally defined it here originally as a varient of the Debian Free Software Guidelines, though you will not see the words free, “freedom”, or “users” mentioned anywhere in that document, but rather find the OSI definition of “Open Source” as a definition of technical guidelines. CW, compare the wording and what is emphasized on the first and third links, and you will see why the article refers to free software and open source in the way it does much more clearly.
In answer to chaoswarriorx rather than the article, you’re talking out of your backside in many places, although you have some good ideas, too.
I speak from practical experience when I say that someone used to GIMP will do about as well in any given job as someone equally used to PhotoShop. Not only that, they’ll probably be able to do everything else on their machine faster, because here in Oz PS costs as much at retail as 8GB of RAM (8 × 1GB sticks), or 4GB of RAM plus 960GB of hard disk (4 × 240GB IDE). Do I need to explain how much of a performance difference that makes to image editing?
Unless, of course, you pirate PS.
Linux can and does make very effective use of ancient hardware. You can either use a light distribution or use the machine as an X terminal. Don’t expect to be able to drop the latest Mandriva on a P2-400 with 32MB of RAM any more than you’d expect to be able to drop XP on it.
What you say about the free market and crappy software is true – only we don’t have any extant examples of a free market. Read Tom Adelstein’s recent article on lxer.com for some of the raw, blood-stained details.
Your Java Battleships game example is a furphy. First off, Java is a shining example of why I use Ruby. Second off, have a look at the CPU monitor when many high-cost commercial games (even 2D) are running. Prepare yourself for a shock.
Novell has lots of examples of free software that you have to purchase, but can then modify. Several local shops also profit from selling TheOpenCD and Linux ISOs. I make a living providing service for, as much as possible, Free software.
All of the differences become moot when you run across some helpless user who’s just had two years’ work irreversibly trashed by a virus. More fool them for not backing up, of course, but still…
Your workload comments are very wide of the mark. Microsoft has a not-untypical policy of one service per server. What they don’t mention is that when you have a file server, email server, application server and web server, you need to buy “seats” for every user for the first three, and possibly the fourth as well, depending upon the situation. It’s very rare (see Novell for an example) to run into anything like this in F/OSS, and without salesmen pushing you to add a new server for every service, the tendency is to make one box do everything. That’s what alexander’s on about. One current customer of mine has, as I count them, nine heavily used services running through their only Linux box.
I just want to touch on piracy again before I hang up. Imagine that you are a student. You were given a machine and a pile of Microsoft software under an educational licence as part and parcel of your course. You reach the end of your course. You now owe large chunks of money to someone for your course, and suddenly you don’t have the right to use any of the software on your computer. Do you (1) ignore that, and keep on running it, or do you (2) go and pay top dollar (non-OEM, non-Edu) prices for new copies of the software (about twice the cost of a new whitebox machine here in Oz), or do you (3) switch to something with which you’re totally unfamiliar? And then Microsoft turns around and claims to be working against piracy. Yeesh.
Using F/OSS avoids all of those traps.
Chaoswarriorx wrote:
“I’d love an example of ‘free software’ that you have to purchase, but then are free to modify”
Redhat Linux would be a good example.
All versions of Redhat cost money to purchase, there is no ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’ version. Redhat, as packaged, contains some things (not software) that are trademarked by Redhat, Inc. These would be things like the name “Redhat”, the little gifs and jpegs of a red hat, and some other things.
http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/trademark/index.html
You can purchase a copy of Redhat, strip out the trademarked stuff, and modify the software all you want. You can call it something else and sell copies of it for whatever price you can charge (some people do this for a buck or two a cd, so the market won’t let you charge very much)
Here are some examples of redhat stripped of it’s non-software proprietary stuff:
whitebox:
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
centOS:
http://www.centos.org/
So, that is an example of software you have to pay for, but are free to modify and change as much as you want too, as long as you strip out the trademarked logos and names.
You might not be interested in doing that to server class software, but businesses, universities, research centers, the military, and government agencies do.
Or you can just download debian and do whatever you want with it, without wasting time stripping out the proprietary stuff.
“I speak from practical experience when I say that someone used to GIMP will do about as well in any given job as someone equally used to PhotoShop.”
Bullshit.
GIMP sucks. Anyone honest with themselves can recognize this.
GIMP is also missing all the professional color palettes that print designers depend on to communicate effectively with commercial printers, to ensure that proper colors are used in printing.