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French Lawmakers Demand Source Code
Interestingly, they also propose that software developers have a "right to develop compatible software." Of course, my right to make my software compatible implies your obligation to document your software and protocols so that I can make my software compatible.
Their proposed law "protects commercial publishers of proprietary software and developer communities of free software against anticompetitive strategies by enforcing in a practical matter the interoperability principle introduced in the European software directive of 1991. Therefore, Article 3 states that 'any individual or moral person has the right to develop, publish and use an original software which is compatible with the communication standards of another software.'"
(Any Francophones want to tell us what "moral person" refers to here? Corporations? Committees? AI software that passes the Turing test?)
>Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
Hmmn. And how much of this behind-closed-doors have you read in order to get a data set to make this generalization? I'd imagine that a lot of proprietary code, for financial and military institutions, for instance, is some of the finest in the art.
First, we make the incorrect generalization that all Open Source code is innately better than all proprietary code; now we're leaping off of that shaky premise to the conclusion that all proprietary code is, in fact, shoddy and embarassing?
Not sure I'm going to buy into this line of thought.
--
Of course, Microsoft France will want to sell to the government. And the requirements of the law aren't anything Microsoft will have trouble fulfilling, they already license their source to selected clients. Using documented protocols for communication is more problematic, but *most* of Microsofts communication *are* using documented protocols. There are a few "extension" they will have to document, though.
Also, remember how big part of the economy the government is in Europe, and how influent France is in EU. If the France government doesn't use Microsoft products, there will be a big pressure for the private sector as well as EU to use compatible software.
The law makes a lot of sense, it is basically what any big company would require from their supliers, if they were smart enough to avoid being dependend on a single source.
Lessee here... according to the CIA World Factbook (a less than ideal source for info, but it's what I have on hand) France has per capita around US$23,000 and grew 3% in 1998 and 1999. It has a somewhat better income distribution, so even the lower GDP per capita translates into comparable incomes to the US for most of the middle class. The French stock market has grown faster than the S&P for the last couple of years. France is currently the biggest producer of high-tech exports in the EU, and is second only to the UK in the amount of foreign direct investment it has received in the last seven years. France has a lower external debt per capita than the US, a trade surplus (America has a trade deficit), low inflation, a smaller percentage of the population in poverty than the US, a higher literacy rate, more people with full health insurance...
If France is a country with severe economic problems, I only wish the rest of the world was so badly off.
Remember, France has very low inflation, as low as the US if not lower over the last few years. The money supply isn't increasing much, besides which, changes in money supply have relatively little direct effect on market valuations. During the high inflation 70's in the US, corporate incomes mostly rose with inflation, but market values didn't start rising significantly until Volker slowed inflation down in the 80's.
Corporate incomes have been generally up in France, but it will take a while for me to find statistics.
US has the largest % of population in prison as I recall).
Indeed, they have; so maybe the problem with the US government is not the 'government' part, but the 'US' part?
It does? Consider what, say, Microsoft can do to you, personally, if it decides it doesn't like you at all. Now consider what the government can do to you if it decides it dislikes you.
s/Microsoft/Scientology/, and there you go. Microsoft is NOT *that* powerful ... what most microsoft-haters fail to take into account is that it's *not* the biggest or most powerful corporation around ... and by far. Their market valuation is enormous, but as far as revenues go, and employees and political influence, typically Oil companies or pharmaceutical companies are much, much more powerful and probably much more crooked in general.
But they could be that big in no time, that being said.
Yeah, insightful, indeed. I could'nt imagine the software vendors fleeing as you claim they would, but then ... who cares? Just use free software. Anyway ... software companies have an interest in selling their stuff to govt agencies, even if it was at a loss: that pretty much sets the standard, most of the time. And there's a lot of corps. out there which are specialized in govt market (I'm not talkiung software specifically). To work with the govt, they certainly need to use compatible software. Hence your post is a farce.
Thus, a company, a corporation, anything that is not made of blood and flesh is a moral person.
--
No wonder you sign "Soldier": you cannot create by yourself, but have to plunder...
--
What you are talking of would be really interesting to discuss if you had some hard, real facts to rely on. No, I do not think that your site is informative. It is a mixture of ramblings on elections results, quotes from legal texts whose status (proposed? voted? pending to be signed into law by the President) is not even clearly stated, and comments whose pertinence is not proved. In short, this site is very much akin to fringe political propaganda (say, communist leaflets): it surely alludes to something true, but is not convincing.
As far as I know, theoretically, nowadays Web sites are considered by law as akin to the written press. A paper publication (say, a magazine or daily newspaper) has to have a "director of publication" and to be declared to the authorities. The basic idea is to have a clear liability trace in case of libel or other publications prohibited by law (such as a call to murder or similar things).
However, in the case of WWW sites, this becomes very unwieldy and is not enforced: people that open a WWW page do not declare themselves as a proper publication. Therefore, some people in parliament found it a good idea to replace these requirements by something more modern. Of course, this attempt was a bit misguided, and surely the law will be repealed and/or amended a lot.
Apparently, they wish users to register with their real name to their ISP. That way, if a user posts, say, a public call to murder black people on his or her WWW site, the judiciary has a clearly defined person to prosecute. Of course, the lawmakers forgot that anyway users could simply ftp such contents to off-shore sites; perhaps showing them how the WWW actually works could make them a little more in touch with what is technically possible.
Members of parliament propose dozens of ill-designed laws each year. I think you overreacted. Posting a comment such as your on a site like Slashdot, where most of the audience is not too knowledgeable about European issues and is prone to knee-jerk libertarian comments, was irresponsible and useless. You had better collect actual facts and make a WWW site that reminds less of the anarchist propaganda leaflets dirty young men give to passers-by outside of universities! :-)
> Interestingly, they also propose that software developers have a "right to develop
> compatible software." Of course, my right to make my software compatible implies
> your obligation to document your software and protocols so that I can make my
> software compatible.
The MPAA isn't going to like this concept. It would mean open source DVD players in France would be a "right" rather than an illegal reverse engineered hack that can turn children who program into criminals.
What constitutes a webmaster? Any person writing a webpage? How would they admminister that huge amount of requests to register? Oh, wai, france have minitel, they don't use the internet. There would be only a minor impact. Probably this is to reduce the number of people using internet in favor of minitel.
I will move to france the 1st of june to work for MandrakeSoft. Hm. I'm a bit scared of all these strange laws about crypto and now perheaps web publishing...
Anyway, if I use any other protocol (Say ftp) instaed of http, or any other format than html, am I still a webmaster?
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
So how would France know that the source code matched the binary they were using? Maybe they'll audit each and every line of code, and compile it themselves. But somehow I doubt it.
It's pretty simple to tell if the binary matches the source. You compile the source and compare the binaries. If you are unable to produce the same binaries as you were given, then you don't have the source code.
-henrik
Microsoft once created a good, operating system for home users, and they never forgot it. France was once a world power, and they have never forgotten that.
This isn't terribly interesting. Lots of large corporations demand and get source code escrow clauses when they buy major mission-critical software from vendors. And lots of RFPs specify adherence to industry standards.
As for the former -- I've never quite seen the point. The idea is that if the company making the software tanks you're not stuck with software you can't fix. But really, what are you gonna do? It would take an army of developers to figure out the code and find a fix. Unless you also get all the internal development docs and hire the (presumably out-of-work) programmers from the company, you're still stuck with lame-duck code.
The French government is just as entitled to refuse to use any closed-source application as the US Military is to refuse to use any single-source hardware.
This is the perfect answer. Use capitalism means to control the capitalist market. If you don't like what someone does, refuse to deal with them.
The US Military doesn't want to end up with a situation where a $25 million dollar jet is grounded because the only supplier of a $5 part is suddenly charging $500,000 for it. That's why they refuse to buy anything that they can't replace from at least two independant sources.
The French government doesn't want to be trapped, forced to buy new copies of MS Office for every public employee just because their copies of Win2k expired and Win2003 broke old Office packages. (Not an unprecedented thing.)
And then there's the security issue. Closed source software can contain any number of evil features. And even if you went through it with a debugger you could never be sure you didn't miss something. That'd be like the Russians (during the cold war) licensing an encryption package from the NSA. By using only open source software, the government ensures that its software is open to wide scrutiny.
It's obvious what'd happen to the tax money, it'd stay in your country, perhaps being used to pay you, instead of going overseas to help someone else.
>>western European nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO
>By western I meant as far as ideologies go, as opposed to eastern russia/asia ideologies.
Right, and my whole point is that while France may have as much influence as the UK, it does not have as much influence as the USA.
>>I don't think anyone outside France thinks that France is as important as the USA in terms of international clout.
>So what, you just take this time to toot your own capitalist horn?
What makes you think I'm a capitalist? Tooting [Bec] or not, I stand by my comment. You are obviously an exception to my generalization. Surprising to find you on
--
E_NOSIG
western European nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO
I don't think anyone outside France thinks that France is as important as the USA in terms of international clout.
Paris meridian my arse (pardon my French).
--
E_NOSIG
This is quite similar to an older proposal made in the French Senate: there was already an article in /. about this previous proposal (where, strangely enough, it was considered much more favorably). However, it was turned down (I do not remember whether it was turned down by the Senate or whether it made its way to the National Assembly and was turned down there). At any rate, I am happy to learn that this proposal (or a similar one) is back on the table (and this time proposed by members of the majority in power, so there are more changes of it getting voted in).
Incidentally, someone was mentioning the bizarre French laws on encryption. These laws have been repealed a year or so ago: by that same (socialist) government which is now proposing this bill.
I think it does have a chance. First, the MPs who are proposing the bill are members of the majority parliamentary group (and party discipline is, in French politics, much more effective than it is in US politics). Second, the French Government has been making some important efforts among similar lines, and I think they will support the bill.
It's interesting to see the difference in attitude between Germany and France as concerns the question of open standards and open source. Germany has been giving substantial amounts of money to various open source projects (notably GPG). France will vote laws. Now which is best?
I think that MIT should Stop MSFT from saying the WIN2K is fully Kerberos 5 compliant. This is a blatent lie and false advertisment. With the Judgement in I think only a FOOL would not see MSFT's intent with this purposefull fudging of Kerberos.
France has historically been a hassle to computer companies. First their bizarre (read: non-conformant with European norms) encryption laws, now this. Just how much clout do they think they have here, exactly?
They think they have as much clout as any other western nuclear soverign power who is a member of NATO, and they'd be right.
-- iCEBaLM
The French tradition of tolerating brutal, oppressive governments until they burgeon to the point of requiring bloody rebellion, then instituting some new government that gleefully tries to outdo its predecessor in gruesome abuse of power, is well known. ...Even if it is a much shorter tradition than the "Anglo-Saxon" one cited above. Many people are also familiar with the much longer Continental tradition of government veneration and cheerful lock-step obedience to officialdom. (This is not to say that Americans don't sometimes need to be slapped away from emulating this tradition themselves, despite your apparent conviction that the anglo-american legal tradition is one of anarchy.)
Post-Revolution France, with a history of violence, colonialism, nationalistic aggression, and oppression that makes the U.S.A.'s bloody history look positively angelic in comparison, really doesn't strike me as great proof for the claim that the French system "promptly" tosses out bad governments. As for checks and balances, they may frustrate people attempting to totally rework the system of government or enforce their pet wishes of broad social change...but that's the point.
In a pleasant fairy-land, the State acts solely to benefit the people, and not mostly to meet goals of higher-ups and enrich bureaucrats and officials. France doesn't count as a pleasant fairy-land. The French government merely tries to offer the most desirable jobs by using taxpayer money to make the positions particularly enticing.
No, taxpayers deserve the very best use of their tax money, which they are forcibly deprived of. Having "the absolute very best people" on government payrolls doesn't necessarily mean the taxpayers benefit at all - all francophobic joking aside, the French people don't deserve exquisitely talented and well-trained censors, commissars, secret police, assassins, and propagandists any more than the rest of us. Even assuming that all those government workers can be said to be honest (because, of course, dishonest people don't try to get attractive jobs) and none of them work in government functions that serve to oppress or impede the people (because France apparently doesn't have a government like any other in human history), it doesn't strike me as obviously just that taxpayers are forced to provide the copious funds necessary to make every government position more desirable than private-sector jobs where the funds come from people choosing to pay...
I have to wonder what system you're trying to contrast this with. The US government has many programs for subsidizing the advanced education of people willing to work for it. Further, it's terribly easy to get a college education in this country. Bone-average students willing to pony up wages from a menial job can get into community colleges in most of this country. If you want to get into a better school, you have to have money or show talent, yes (as said by someone who didn't know anyone to brown-nose, but managed to get scholarships and grants to go to college).
You really just missed the point, there. It's not an issue of wanting the state to go away (personally, I wish I could believe that anarcho-capitalism would work, but I'll have to settle for minarchism), but about people realizing that the State has big (often overriding) priorities and goals that have nothing to do with fulfilling its duties to the people and contradict the freedoms and rights of the people.
Ah, yes, the "freedom and limited government are the tools of the corporate bastards keeping us down" theory. So much stronger and more plausible than the "government can be and has been damned dangerous before in the past, so let's keep it under control" theory, because, of course, proponents of limited government, who also oppose such things as corporate subsidies and government-instituted monopolies and sweetheart deals, are just the mindless tools of Big Money.
If the corporation has such total power over me, it IS a State. :) I don't, and few people do, reject the idea that some government is necessary. Malicious corporations, groups, churches, families, and individuals do need to be restrained from infringing upon the rights of others. However, governments, being usually the repositories of the most weapons and the people willing to use them on other people on command, are inherently more difficult to restrain once they get too dangerous. (Which makes me wonder how you reconcile your love of bloody revolution with the desire to glorify and empower the state so that it can't be rebelled against.) Hence the desire to keep them limited.
(Incidentally, the only way a corporation can take my house against my will here is if the government wants it to do so and forecloses on my house. It's called "Eminent Domain" and happens too damn often. And before you protest that the corporation somehow bullies the government into this evil behavior, governments do the same thing all the time, here, when they want your land for something and you don't like the price they initially offer.)
I wouldn't trust the government to not leak my code (making my application free)
How would that make your application free? If you're worried about free-as-in-beer, the government leaking your binary would have the same effect. If you're worried about free-as-in-speech, copyright law prevents it from becoming so.
I agree that if you work in the closed-source world (like I do) that having your source code leaked is not a good thing. Not because it makes the program available to people for free (a leaked binary would do the same), but because it allows other people to package your program into their closed-source application and claim it as their own. This problem, however, would disappear if everything were open (open as in the source code was available to license holders, not open as in the open source definition). Books by their very nature are open, but does plagiarism run rampant in the book industry? No, because the open nature of books makes plagiarism easy to detect. Oh, look, now I'm ranting at you for no good reason.
Wired has a short interview with the Marketing Director of MS France here.
MS seems to interpret the law as requiring that they open source Windows. He almost threatens to stop selling to the French government if the law through.
He says, 'If it was passed as it looks today it might make doing business with public authorities very difficult.'
Though they may be trying to exagerate the impact to build support against the bill.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Ask yourself. If you were a corporation with a business model based upon proprietary secrets, would you:
A) release the secret to an intimate group of 30,000 beaurocrats in order to secure the French account
B) say "screw France" and refuse to comply
France has historically been a hassle to computer companies. First their bizarre (read: non-conformant with European norms) encryption laws, now this. Just how much clout do they think they have here, exactly?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Seriously, though, I'm not sure how well this will really work in practice. Just because you have access to source code does not necessarily means that you would ever want to use it. Code written behind closed doors tends to stay that way for a reason (it is usually pretty embarassing.)
It is also interesting to note that in the US any code developed through a federal grant must be released into the public domain.
-p.
If the NSA is going to put backdoors in software, or implement other monitoring schemes, it doesn't really matter which nation they are dealing with. They have the ability to subvert entire organizations. So how would France know that the source code matched the binary they were using? Maybe they'll audit each and every line of code, and compile it themselves. But somehow I doubt it.
Consider the NSA "relationship" with Crypto AG, a Swiss company. Just look it up on Google if you're not familiar.
Best regards,
SEAL
> would interpret this as requiring full open
> documentation of all the Windows/Office/IE/VB
> APIs.
Lets not forget Kerberos. Foir Win2k it would mean
that M$ Kerberos (which as we all know only
differs from real kerberos by a tiny bit) would
have to be documented...so non-MS servers could
serve Kerberos Tickets, even to Win2K machines.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
heh
French Culture is fairly differnt from american
culture. They are related, they have alot in
common, but they are certainly also very differnt.
Tho....the flame was stupid in other ways...
certainly the french DO have McDonnalds (hell
their McDonnalds sells beer even)
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I would disagree on a minor point...
No software should EVER be considered a security
problem if its released. If they are relying on
the fact that noone knows how the program works
to keep things secure....then they deserve what
they get.
All software they write should be released as
source to the world. They should be relying on
solid math and hardware to be keeping security,
not the obscurity of their algorithms.
By forcing them to release the code, you force
them to not even consider writting code that
relies on its own secrecy.
Besides...with the small exception of immediate
military secrets (like orders to tell troops where
to move) the government shouldn't be allowed to
keep ANY secrets AT ALL. (with the exception of
private data like SSNs, Census data, and of
course their own encryption keys).
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> I don't see this (the French government claim to
> source disclosure) as a good thing. I am highly
> distrustful of governments and giving more power
> to them -- and this is a power grab by the
> government,
Well I am one of those weirdos who thinks
government was one of the "Top 10 worst ideas that
anyone ever had". I think they don't deserve any
trust at all...however...I see this very
differntly.
This is simply a sensible internal policy. They
are not saying "You have to give us the source".
They are simply setting an INTERNAL policy for
their own offices that "We wont use it, if it
doesn't come with source".
I think that governments SHOULD do things like
this, if they want to exist. They should require
even more strict things. They should require
things like "No government agency is allowed to
buy product from a company that makes the product
overseas and gives the workers less wages and
benefits than they could give local workers"
(ie, no sweat shops).
This is simply saying "This is the kind of thing
we want to suport". They are not saying you can't
make closed software, just that "We wont buy it".
I think its one of the few good things I have
ever seen a government do.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Practically you've got a long way to go.
I live in a typical .gov installation where there are email attachments rife with .doc, .xls, .ppt extensions that the senders expect to be understood as if they are Standard Formats. Web pages, too, constantly refer to such binary proprietary formats, with the occassional helpful tag that clicking on the link
Not if you don't pay all of your taxes to MS it won't launch Word.
When I try to explain that I can't read their attachment I usually get blank stares, mystified befuddlement, confused silence (they're thinking "Oh! You're computer must be broken just now. It happens to me and My Computer all the time, too!") and attempts to resend the exact same document as if it would be OK after my computer was fixed and rebooted like happens so often to theirs!
Any attempt to explain the difference between formats dictated and hidden by a profit-making corporation and those that are documented in a publicly accessible RFC are usually met with polite impatience.
StarOffice has been some practical help, but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem -- that virtually all of the business of the U. S. Government would cease if their MS licences were to suddenly expire.
Hmmmm... that might not be such a bad idea!.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Those of us who maintain and administer servers in the IT dept want as much open source as possible because we can go find more accurate answers, more quickly, than we've ever gotten from a private company's tech support, and it works better - (more efficient server processes). The management wants a product with a support contract to feel safe. Also, once they have funding for a development project, it's use it or lose it so if an off-the-shelf product will produce results and time and resources are tight, then that's what is used. So there's kind of a tug-of-war and the fact that people like me come in and get things working and then leave for a better job with less bureaucratic nonsense, doesn't help things.
Then there's the problem of alot of development projects being out-sourced to vendors who are nothing more than 3rd-party proprietary product pimps, (say that 10X fast), although management has recently begun to listen to those of us who support the servers, after much persistence, and are being more stringent about rejecting proposals that do not comply with our current Oracle/Apache/Solaris shop.
So the branch of state government I work for does try to use open source whenever it can and has a tacit understanding that everything is to be developed in such a manner that it can be ported to a different platform if needed so that moving to open source is an option if the time and resources ever become available, but it's not always possible right off the bat.
- tokengeekgrrl
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions
hmmm...so by your argument, then data is king. Data is the only thing that ever needs to be protected (kept secret, that is), never the programs or source codes, right? Well, that makes sense.
I guess what I wrote wasn't clear, because I happen to agree exactly with what you are saying about how security should not be through obscurity. That's why I think in many ways the softwre that the US government uses should be open source. However, say if there were military algorithms for missile controls (I don't know of a better example), then I would say they should be classified and kept under wraps. Again, I agree with you on that as well.
As far as US government software is concerned, I think aside from all the classified and confidential software written for the government which would be something akin to 'classified open source' (meaning, the source is completely available within the government to all those with the proper security clearance), all other software such as office productivity applications and OSes that are general purpose and do not contain top-secret algorithms/code should be Open Source. That was a long sentence. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that all government software that is not security-sensitive should be open source. Why? Because I think the government, more than anyone else, would want to know that the software that they use do not have security holes. I'm sure all the software that they use that ARE security sensitive would follow the same open source approach, except that the source is not 'open' to the public.
Does anyone know how the government ensure that the software they use do not have security problems? Or are they so tight on physical and network security that they are not worried about it?
I know that there are many problems with my suggestions above, not the least of which is that Open Source software is often not end-product oriented, but re-packaged with additional software developed by companies to provide the final end-user product. And this is why I thought it would make sense for the government to create its own distro. If they were to develop their own software based on open-source, they'd have to do less work, have more control over what they use, etc.
Does this make sense?
It is not entirely true that the French do not care about government influence in economic affairs. The French government installed shorter work weeks, I believe 35 hours a week instead of 40, and many companies protested saying it would only make it harder for them to make a profit when they have to send people home an hour early.
Personally I would take offense at the government telling me when I had to go home, deep in hack, hitting a Zen state of programming, oh damn it's 2pm, time to go home...pfft!
This is something useful that can be exercised upon every software company. Maybe there wouldn't be a need for DOJ if what French were doing was the thing for the entire globe. It may be a requirement that a company always opens its standards, this generates more competition and progress, if the company opposes, take its selling license away. Easy
You can't handle the truth.
You guessed right, jamie. When the French text of the proposed law refers to "personne physique ou morale", this means "a human being or a collective entity recognized as such for certain legal purposes." Basically, the law says that any person, organization, or corporation has the right to develop compatible software.
My bicyles
France (not the people, but the government) has a few severe problems with it's economic system, and it is extending the same philosophy that caused these problems to software.
Essentially, they are starting to treat software manufacturers like equity owners (shareholders).
In France, the rights of a shareholder are minimal. Unlike in the US, where shareholder interests are supreme and codified into the law, France gives very few rights to shareholders - decisions to improve a companies financial health and the wealth of the shareholders take a back seat to worker "rights" to employment, etc.
The result? France attracks little foreign investment, and investors in France do not invest domestically. The capital flows to countries where their property rights are protected (US, UK, Europe).
Thus France suffers from high unemployment and a lack of capital for new business start ups. When is the last time you bought anything that said "Made in France."
Now, they are extending this philosophy - a disregard for property rights - to the area of intellectual property.
The same results will follow with software in France.
It isn't that there is a problem with open source-like schemes. The problem is when the government compels is, no matter how well-intentioned.
Soldier(R)
Soldier(R)
Standardization is good. Easy and open, sanctioned sharing of information is good. I even believe that socialism can be a better government system than ours if it's executed properly. It's nice to see that France is using its powers for good instead of evil. This will make learning and competing (as much as is possible under socialism) much easier. Maybe this experiment in policy will set a good precedent for other nations.
Instant Crisis
>And what makes you say that? Want to elaberate a little?
Love to.
>I really feel that Open Source code is at least as good as propriety, if not better. It isn't
>allways better, of course, but nearly allways it is.
See, that's the thing. "I really feel." Show me the numbers.
For every buggy proprietary program you want to show as evidence, I can dig up some splinter version of identd or MAME launcher or desktop environment that's as Open Source as the day is long, but still is horribly broken and terribly coded.
Being Open Source doesn't INHERENTLY create quality. It provides the _mechanism_, the _opportunity_ for better code, for all of the reasons we all know and love.
But opening the source to a program doesn't automatically mean it will suddenly get an interested multitude of good developers with excellent coding and communications skills to wrangle out all of the bugs and comment all of the files. That CAN happen, but there's no guarantees that it will.
Being Open Source is good for many things, finding and fixing bugs more easily, keeping programs from being orphanned, creating public libraries of known-good code. But it's still software development like any other software development, and without a dedicated core team of talented engineers, you're not going to make another Apache or Linux kernel just because of your license choice.
Or, to sum up, saying Open Source code is at least as good as proprietary code makes no sense. Open Source code ranges from idiotic to sublime, just like proprietary code. Neither one is 'nearly always' better than the other in any measure that's not purely philosophical.
Sense?
--
Around the same time as when it becomes impractical/impossible for a Congressman/woman/critter to be bought.
Suffice to say, not soon.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
This is a good view to take, and I think it represents the situation accurately in this case. But consider this, the government is fighting on multiple fronts. They have not only lost power to individuals, they have also been losing to corportations. One way to win in a multi-front war is to get your enemies to fight amoungst themselves, but come to the aid of the weeker if one side starts to win.
The current situation provide WAY to much power to the corps. The proposed law strengthens the hands of the people and checks the corps. Yes the government is also strengthened, but does it matter in this case? Is it a power grab, or aid to the losing side? I tend toward the latter and say let's take our wins where we can.
The gov may be strengthen in this instance, but it is at the expense of the corps. As individuals, we are fighting a two front war also. If we let either the corps or gov get to strong we lose.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Interesting to see this coming down to the micro level.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
That's a really nice troll, and I find it interesting that it got moderated up to 4. I guess that moderation shows how ignorant the average slashdot reader is. Anyway ... As for your question, when is the last time something you bought had the label "made in france" ... well that's a really good question and I suggest for example that you open up your ADSL modem, your DirecTV MPEG decoder chip (my uncle designed it ...), or examine closely some flash ram chips (all made by ST Micro). More generally, french economy is much more oriented towards export than the US economy. And oh yeah, our trade balance is positive ... you could compare this to the abyssal US trade deficit.
In a french society, there is no inherent visceral distrust of the government nor of the State. In France, there was no magna-carta to inflate the heads of power-hungry people to the point of totally subverting the State to the needs of the few powerful people who have enough wealth to run things as they whish.
In France, whenever the State or the Government thinks it can pull a fast one on the people, the people rebel and promptly overthows the culprit. This does a far more effective job than the labyrinth of byzantine anglo-saxon "checks and balances" that merely insure that only seasoned special interest group lobbyists will be able to steer things their ways in the ensuing political quagmire.
The french people therefore puts a lot of trust in the State, and the State has a therefore much larger role than in anglo-saxon societies. It is also an active economic partner; french people think nothing of having the State running profitable businesses (for one thing, 100% of their profits go back to the State, so that's so much more money that the people will have less to pay in taxes).
Even better, for the french, working for the State is not viewed as a bad thing; in fact, the State skims the best of the best in the schools, and offers free schooling in special schools that turn-out civil servants of exceptionnal ability, competence and talent. Recent French historry is peppered with thousands of such people of very humble extraction that rose to very influential positions, thanks to those State schools, and returned the favour with exceptionnal service to the State, for the benefit of the whole population, not just a few lucky shareholders.
And that's only legitimate: the taxpayers deserve the absolute very best people to work with their tax money.
This systems insure that anybody that has the potential for exceptional service receives the training for it, not just the very few whose fathers can afford college, or those who are lucky enough to brownnose themselves a scholarship.
The State is an emanation of the WHOLE NATION, and therefore it HAS TO WORK FOR THE WHOLE NATION. If it doesn't, that state is overthrown, either forcefully (1789, 1848), or peacefully (1959).
Of course the State has to stay in power!!! There is only one State, and it's disappearance means anarchy. But only something that is legitinate can assume statehood, and it is certainly not the unaccountable private corporations that are so aggressively vying for statehood can be legitimate.
You are incredibly blindfolded by the biggest anglo-saxon collective neurosis: the fear and distrust of the State. You are a perfect example of people being brainwashed by the continuous anti-State propaganda whose only purpose is to shrink the State so much that it will no longer stand in the way of big corporations who want to make the biggest amount of profit at the expense of everyone else.
Now, if there is no more State to make laws that protects you against greedy corporations, what will you do when some corporation decides that it wants your own house?
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In France, the Government carefully caters to the needs of the people who elect it: the population.
And it is a good thing! This prevents the social structure of the society from crumbling to a state where nobody can expect help from other people, and cannot trust anybody else, including the State (like it currently is in the United States).
French society is a much more balanced society than anglo-saxon societies. The "Economy" may be important, but is is NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, as one may think by looking at an anglo-saxon society.
So, it is therefore a good thing that shareholders rights are not paramount before the rights of the majority of the population.
After all, that majority of the population are not entrepreneurs nor investors, and they elect a government that has to ensure that the State looks after their best interests.
Last time I checked, France *IS* *IN* *Europe*. And property rights are very well protected in France, as well as human rights are.
Now, what is more important, property rights, or human rights???
But the employers have, by law, to insure better working conditions than in anglo-saxon countries. Workers can work efficiently without having to worry about getting the boot tomorrow, even if they work satisfactorly. Good engineers can stay working as good engineers, without having to think about bailing out and starting their own upstart company, thus wasting the talent of a good engineer turned into a not-so-good administrator. It's not for nothing that Airbus is eating a whole chunk of american aerospace industry!!!! Ever flew in a Caravelle??? Rode in a Citroën DS??? Both (made 40 years ago) STILL run circles around the best american industry can produce TODAY.
The continuous refusal of britain to follow european social and human-right standards when it comes to human/property rights is quite indicative of the primitive state of anglo-saxon societies, where only the most powerful can thrive (at the expense of others), just like in the stone age.
A true display of blatant ignorance, and typical anglo-saxon ethnocentrism; a stauch refusal to consider viewpoints different from one's. France is a country that has been built as much upon intellectual property as "physical" property. It is not for nothing that french Culture is one of the richest in the west; for each Shakespeare, France will boast hundreds of Racine, Montesquieu, Molière, Beaumarchais, Rabelais, Voltaire and whatnot.
How many litterature nobel prizes???
How many science nobel prizes???
Surely such a country cannot blatantly disregard TRUE intellectual property!!!
In the 1960s, France was at the forefront of software developpment. Then the 1970's came along with american computer companies strong-arm tactics. French informaticiens never forgot how they lost their prominence to snake-oil. They had their lesson, and will never be caught at it again.
How about when private concerns compel close-source? Is that better? Will you have the balls to say that it is "well intentioned" towards the public good???
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RMS would like this one in particular:
Q: Does this Law allow the use of Free Software?
A: Yes, all Free Software is compatible with this Law by nature since Free Software source code is public and since all communication standards can be derived from the knowledge of the source code.
Note the use of the words "Free Software" instead of "Open Source Software". They clearly are using "Free" to mean libre, rather than gratis.
Q: Isn't is sufficient to require access to the source code?
A: No, because on the one hand, access to the source granted only to public organisations is not sufficient to guarantee that communication standards used to exchange information with citizens are open communication standards. Moreover, on the other hand, it would be incompatible with private property and competityion [sic] Law to force all software publishers to give public access to the source code.
That's the real kicker. Revealing source code to a third party (as opposed to "Open Source") is not good enough--you need to make your standards open. Also, they don't force anyone to try to totally open their source. RMS is probably cringing here, but this point will go a long way toward making this more acceptable to developers.
France (not the people, but the government) has a few severe problems with it's economic system, and it is extending the same philosophy that caused these problems to software.
Not true. They have a nice 35 hour work week, their productivity is up dramatically due to enforcing it, and they use Linux for all the DSL access to their schools. If you're a Bill G type who wants to get rich on the backs of the people, you won't like them, but most Open Source coders don't have megabucks and aren't in search of them.
In France, the rights of a shareholder are minimal. Unlike in the US, where shareholder interests are supreme and codified into the law, France gives very few rights to shareholders - decisions to improve a companies financial health and the wealth of the shareholders take a back seat to worker "rights" to employment, etc.
And this is bad? I've owned French ADRs and I don't have a problem with the French way of doing things.
The result? France attracks little foreign investment, and investors in France do not invest domestically. The capital flows to countries where their property rights are protected (US, UK, Europe).
That was last century, ma vielle, massive inflows of capital to France are the hallmark of late 1999 and all of 2000. Wake up and smell the cafe au lait!
Thus France suffers from high unemployment and a lack of capital for new business start ups. When is the last time you bought anything that said "Made in France."
Last week, I did. And unemployment is dropping there as capital flows in. Try keeping up if you're going to invest worldwide, ok?
Now, they are extending this philosophy - a disregard for property rights - to the area of intellectual property.
If you mean a requirement that Privacy Rights of Citizens are higher than Property Rights of Companies, of course. And that's a good thing. Why should the EU follow the disasterous example of US Privacy Rights, which give away everything to corporations, including intellectual property that should belong to the people?
The same results will follow with software in France. It isn't that there is a problem with open source-like schemes. The problem is when the government compels is, no matter how well-intentioned.
I doubt it. I'm betting a lot of money that it's not so. And so are a lot of other worldwide investors, who think you're out to lunch on this subject. So, we have to accept a little bureaucracy, so what? At least we have an ordered and equal financial market with educated consumers. Not like Italy or Russia, where bribery is the way of the world.
Will in Seattle
I guess european countries are getting scared of the control US companies have on the software they use. Regardless how security-threatening the last MS backdoor was, it frightening for a nation to know that NSA or any other organization can put backdoors in Windows (or other software from any closed-source vendor). The US is not too worry, since a potential NSA backdoor would not benefit other countries, but the europeans are.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The 17 may 2000, the french will vote for the creation of a "Conseil Supérieur de l'Internet" : Where all french Webmasters need and ID and administrativ authorisation to publish any information on Internet (web, ftp, irc, ...)
French Risk to pay 1200$ and/or 6 month of prison. If they are not autorised to publish information on internet.
More info (in french) at
http://www.article11.net/
and http://altern.org/defense/vote/
Close. In French law, "moral person" is opposed to "physical person" (ie, individual). So a moral person is any entity to which law applies but is not an individual: corporations, non-profit organizations, etc.
Since code is considered speech by some people, they're probably just making sure that it's all written in French, without any American idioms creeping into the language...
*ducks*
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
it would demand that software used by the French government have its source code available
In the French political tradition the government (== the state) is much more powerful and subject to less checks and balances than in the Anglo-American tradition. I see this as the continuation of the trend: the government is (slyly) trying to increase its power in the Information Age.
One, often useful, view on what's happening treats economic and political life as a huge power game, played by three kinds of players: governments, corporations, and individuals. Recently (second half of the XX century) the governments have been on the losing side -- their power vis-a-vis other players have somewhat declined. Since the first goal of any government is to stay in power, and the second is to grab as much power as it can get away with, this makes government unhappy. Add to this the (yet) unfettered freedom of the 'net and the governments start to look positively worried.
I don't see this (the French government claim to source disclosure) as a good thing. I am highly distrustful of governments and giving more power to them -- and this is a power grab by the government, make no mistake about it -- does not strike me as something to be applauded. I recognize that corporations are not all benevolent either, but I still think that governments are more dangerous.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Interesting bit:
, Olivier Ezratty, VP of marketing and communication for Microsoft France said that Microsoft was eventually ready to grant some independent technical authority full access to the source code of Microsoft software within government control. Also, Microsoft often makes custom versions of their products for large consulting companies in order to comply with their needs. Eventually, Microsoft is also free to publish a detailed and consistent documentation on its comunication standards so that they become open standards.
Glad to know that Microsoft will not be prohibited from publishing consistent and complete documentation.
But seriously, this sounds like a very good use of government power. I'd hate to see the government get into the business of dictating development techniques (much as I love open source), and this seems like a good way of encouraging open standards without deliberately antagonizing powerful companies like MS.
Can your IM do this?