Related link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26928.html
Venezuela has now decreed that all software developed for its use must be licensed under the GPL, and has further issued an official preference to free software rather than proprietary.
I like this country’s approach, but I still wonder if this is the direction
in which we need to go. Read the article for more details.
I also want to address a comment on my previous entry to this log from O’Reilly
network user gerardm. His comment can be found here.
It’s rather extensive, and a decent read, but I’d like the opportunity for a
rebuttal.
The responsibilities of a government, the user says, are to do the best job
possible and to be as open as possible to its people. In actuality, a
strictly theoretical government does not have those responsibilities per se.
Government exists to (a) control people using its power of coercion and (b)
raise revenue for itself. The particular form of government dictates
whether those people governed have any control over the agenda of the
government. In the United States and elsewhere, part of our political
culture is derived from the core value of self-government, in which the people
indirectly decide how they want the government to protect them. But that’s
because we’re a democracy (although rapidly heading towards empire, in my
opinion, but that’s another matter and I digress). So the responsibilities
of a government according to gerardm really aren’t its responsibilities
at all. They are, very simply and plainly, goals to which the people who
are governed would like the administration to adhere.
Now, setting the pedantry aside, gerardm wonders how democracy is
helped by making software proprietary. This is where Venezuela’s approach
comes in and is refreshing. It requires all software developed
specifically for their government’s use to use open source standards and
coding. I don’t have nearly as much problem with this approach–which
really seems to make sense–as I do with the "ban all commercial software,
we’re going with Eric Raymond" policies that Peru is investigating
implementing, and that Thomas Greene of The Register was advocating. As I
said in my first weblog entry on this topic, governments shouldn’t deprive
themselves of the ability to obtain the right tool for the right job. What
if commercial software is better for a specific task, and yet it’s prohibited
from use within the government? The government itself suffers, which makes
the people suffer in various degrees according to the amount of political
business they conduct with the government.
The user, gerardm, further says that when a government uses
proprietary formats when conducting its daily business with its people, it
"makes people pay an extra tax in order to see that
publication." Theoretically, yes, that is true; but in practice, it’s
not at all true. I do work for a data reselling company in Charlotte, NC,
that obtains financial and purchase information on construction equipment from publicly
available documents filed by the buyer or secured party with the individual
secretaries of state. Much of this data is now coming to us in bulk in XML
format. XML is an open standard, which can be read, used, written, and
maintained with proprietary or open source software. I use
Windows when dealing with that data, and I’m currently having a lot of trouble
massaging it into the format in which we need it. Another colleague might
use Linux to do what I’m doing, and that’s fine, and not even really the
issue. The issue–read: the pain–in this is when some states send us
bulk data in Excel format, and heaven forbid, some states send images embedded
in a Microsoft Word document. We can deal with that data immediately, even
though it’s in a closed format. With an open format, I have to go through
this massaging procedure that I’m banging my head against. So, for this
Charlotte company and me personally, I’m paying "an extra tax in order to
see" this data that’s so much better in XML format than it is in Word,
Excel, or even DBF format. (I hope that last sentence is completely
dripping with sarcasm, because that’s the way I intended it.)
It all comes down to this: if we require governments to use open source
software and standards, we’re limiting the options by which those governments
can effectively serve, protect, and govern us. Limiting options is never a
good thing, and I believe that’s what started the entire open-source debate in
the first place. Let’s not make things difficult on ourselves. Use
the best tool for the job, whatever that tool might be.
Is this the right compromise between mandating open source and letting governments lead themselves into the Microsoft licensing trap?
