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Free Software Law for Argentina

There's presently a law being discussed at the Congress in Argentina, that would make mandatory the use of and migration to Free Software when possible.

That law was originally proposed by a Congressmen, but he contacted people from the Free Software Community in Argentina (non-profit organizations, LUGs, etc.), and we have already suggested many changes that are making into the law. This has already a big push from a lot of people (including RMS), but we are interested about opinions and suggested changes for the law, coming from the Slashdot community

Sorry for not having an URL published, there's one but we have very little bandwidth

This is a translation of the law being discussed. It's already in discussion at the congress, and moving on

Note: all uses of the "free" word are for spanish "libre", i.e, free as in free speech, not free beer.

Policy for Free Software use for the Federal State

Article 1: The National Public Administration, Decentralized Organizations and corporations where the State is a majoritary shareholder will only use for their IT systems and equipments free programs (software).

Article 2: "free program (software)", will be understood as software with a license of use that guarantees the user, without an extra fee, the following rights:

1. Non-restricted use of the program for any purpose
2. Exhaustive inspection of the internal program operation.
3. Use of the internal working, and of arbitrary segments of the program, to adaptate them to user needs
4. Production and distribution of copies of the program
5. Modification of the program, and free distribution of the modifications and the resulting new program, under these same conditions.

Article 3: The source program of any free program must be the primary resource used by the programmer for modifying and inspecting it. Therefore, no program categorized as free can contain any restriction difficulting its access, or intermediate stages as output from a non-free pre-processor or compiler.

Article 4: Licenses for free programs used by the National Public Administration, Decentralized Organizations, and corporations where the State is a majoritary shareholder, will have, in all cases, to allow explicitly modification and derived works, as well as non-restricted distribution of these works with the same license as the original program.

Article 5: The Executive Power will set in a term of 180 days, the conditions, timelines, and ways to implement the transition from present systems to free programs as defined in Articles 1 to 4; and will move future licitations and contracting of computer programs (software) in that direction.

Artice 6: From the date established by the Executive Power on, Public National Organizations mentioned in article 1 of this law, will not be allowed to use programs that store data in non-public format, or with licenses which:

1. Imply any form of discrimination to people or groups.
2. Don't fulfill of the preceding Article 2.
3. Are specific or exclusive for only one product.

Article 7: Once finished the transition term, with a duration regulated by the National Executive Power as expressed in Article 5, there will be exclusively contracting and use of free computer programs.

Article 8: The Public State Universities, the Provincial and the City Governments, and the Autonomous Government of the city of Buenos Aires are invited to adhere this initiative

Article 9: Communicate this to the National Executive Power"