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Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
andyo writes "Why Human Rights Requires Free Software: Report on a practitioner's view of the critical role free software plays in the work of human rights activists around the globe."
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No no no no no no, that's not what the article says at all!
The point of the article is that in order to do Human Rights work, the all partions of your data collection and processing must be transparent and above reproach. Free Software facilitates this by letting all parties examine the code behind the data presented so that bias and obfuscation are minimized. Basically, the subject of the article wants to be able to show people human rights statistics and data without having to resort to expensive software where what's "going on under the hood" is not apparent to all. That's all. There's nothing about how Free Software is a basic human right. It's just a tool used by some of those who seek to protect and defend human rights, a means to an end.
It's not like someone is trying to outlaw the writing of Free software, or suppress the Free software movement.
Unfortunatelly there are several initiatives (mandatory hadrware DRM in PC among them) that will render free software useless as non-interoperable with commercial one. This is as close as you can get without explicitly stating it to outlaw free software.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
I'm sure this is quite offtopic, but what the hell.
/. is wasting a lot of space posting the transcripts of what some microsoft employee says, then the 20 rebuttles from the free softwar community. I think I could do without it. Any chance we can make "Free Software-Good/Bad" it into a category so it can be filtered out by everyone? Or maybe just throw it in with the "Jon Katz" category...
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's overkill to give a spot on the front page to every article that expresses an opinion on how good/bad free software is?
Sure, the first few discussions that reach the mainstream public... that makes sense. Now,
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We need a new acronym. RTFA: Read The Fine Article
It's not like someone is trying to outlaw the writing of Free software, or suppress the Free software movement
You might be wrong about this. The Senate currently considering a bill which would require all personal computers to have DRM built in and Microsoft holds the patent on DRM Operating Systems. If Microsoft refuses to license this to any other companies or prices the license out of reach, this would effectivly outlaw Linux and any other OSS/Free project that either doesn't have access to the license or can't afford the license.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power - Benito Mussoli
Actually the author doesn't make the point that "the right to Free software" is "a basic human right"--it might be inferred from the title, but that's an incomplete [and inaccurate] picture. The question more lies with human rights organizations--Amnesty International, various NGOs, etc.--and their use of nonfree software that hinders their effectiveness. I agree with the author's major points, but there are a few concessions even I as a free software enthusiast must make:
1) RE: accountability & verification
Sure, the scientific community at large relies on a gratuitous mix of free and nonfree software for research, analysis, publication, etc. The author's strongest point in this argument is the factor of openness in review: those scrutinizing the process of arriving at such and such results are able to clearly argue the methodology's weaker points. You can't usually do this with closed proprietary packages because you have to _assume_ that all that has already been accounted for (although all researchers have big fat disclaimers in their papers as to scientific and analysis error, etc.).
I'm not quite sure of the non-openness being a "non-starter," however. I know of some human rights organizations that use nonfree software, and I don't think the verification of authenticity has ever been questioned.
2) The basic premise in the author's argument seems to be that free software would be ideal _given that its developers have a healthy conscience and world view_. Anyone who has taken a sociology and/or anthropology class--or even read an article or review that presented a perspective "not normally accepted"--knows that this isn't always the case. I'm not going to try and pigeon-hole developers because we're all different, but software development follows a pragmatic roadmap. There are _very_ few of us doing this thing because a) we love it; b) we want to make the world a "better place" [and not just the crap you scrawl on resumes and applications]. Often people say this view is too "relativistic," but you have to consider that "human rights" in and of itself is _extremely_ relativistic: beyond the ones that _we_ feel are necessary, we're out there "improving the living conditions" on a very subjective basis.
This is something the author should have emphasized as well: free software developers need to be passionate about world views that largely affect everyone, not just in isolated cases.
All, in all, however, a very good presentation.
Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary encryption program or statistical package to political activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this; take my word that it works right."
As someone who works for a company that produces statistical software I found this comment to be rather close-minded and wrong. My company, along with most others, goes through extensive certification testing to make sure that our software produces correct results. Our software is used by a broad range of academics, private sector researchers, government workers, and not-for-profit groups; and not once have I ever heard anyone even suggest that our program produces purposefully inaccurate results.
Quite honestly, there are no open-source statistical software packages that even come close to offering the benefits of our package. Although R has shown some promise, the documentation that comes with our software alone is worth the price. I have yet to see an open-source package that comes with the same in-depth encyclopedic reference documentation that we produce.
Just because it's closed-source doesn't mean we're evil.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
That conversation snippit really got me thinking about this. What does everyone else think?
Many if not most of those who did survive probably owe their good fortune to one of the first "computers": the British Colossus machine that was used to crack German codes. This significatly shortened the war, stopping Hitler's plans before they were carried out to completion.
You begin a good "straw man" attack.
The notion that software expressed in source code is a form of speech has been established in U.S. courts, at least. An attack on the "right" to free software is an attack against a category of free speech, and would represent an erosion of the entire category of free speech rights.
No?Maybe not in the U.S.,
maybe not right now.
In the recent past, the idea of free software was seriously threatened by a number of high-profile cases, mostly around the topic of encryption. There are many pending and emerging cases involving patents, so-called 'intellectual property' and Digital Rights. All of these represent an effort by various established interests to classify free software as an infrigement on their rights.
Nobody expected Habeus Corpus to come under attack in the United States, 18 months ago. Surprising and drastic things happen in a very short time.
The artical in question does not even advance a claim like this.It is proposed that all software used by Human Rights workers in the field should be free software (Software Libre,) wherever it is at all possible.
It is also advanced that there are inherent inequalities in the control and trust relationships with proprietary vendors - which might be acceptable parts of a social contract for home use or doing business. Nonetheless this is a repugnant situation and represent an unacceptable risk to the mission of the workers and the well-being of subjects in Human Rights field-work.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers. This is in part due to reuse of old labor (code)as well as presumebly cheaper pay.
As far as cheaper pay there are already systems of natural and artifical checks and balances to keep an equilibrium of pay for services releative to the cost of living.
As far as free labor (code), the laborers have to feed themselves and therefore will have to dedicate resources to paid labor. Also, the "free" labor could have been part of an assignment for a class that would be bartered for college credits that would eventually be bartered for a degree.
So in conclusion, yes free software is causing companies to fire experienced professionals and replace them with part time college students. However, this is not neccessarally a bad thing. If the professionals are really that damn good they will be able to get another job. If they can't then society probally has little need for their labor and they will learn new other skills or work for what the college students are working for. The obvisious conclusion of this is there will be less college students taking up computer science/CIS and less free software written. This will cause a greater demand for programmers and greater rates of pay. Hence capatialism will keep the market in check.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
The argument made in the article is illogical and plain silly.
Statistical software doesn't need to be open source for people to know whether it works right - the algorithms used are well-established and documented. e.g. Matlab has extensive documentation which describes the algorithms used for each function. Furthermore it's easy to check whether the software is works correctly by running it through test cases.
The fact that a piece of software (e.g. matlab, excel,etc.) is used by scientists, financial engineers, etc. is a better assurance of reliability than its open sourceness.
Why, whatever did the framers of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution ever do before the concept of Free Software?
What a bunch of tripe. Human rights requires vigilance and dedication. Software systems are a non-sequitur--they can express freedom, but they cannot create it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
In fact, it is a simple task to bias results from an open source product. Just change the source to bias your data, and you're pretty much guaranteed that nobody will find out.
On the other hand, you can't change the source code of a commercial product, which as the parent post said, lots of people know how to interpret data from. This makes is significantly harder to dupe people with fudged data.
The level of nastiness that this post has generated is very disappointing. There are some silly comments in the slapdash story, especially the comment about closed and non-free software being inferior because it is less transparent. Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results and also by the inclusion of results of those programs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The point of the article, which would be a better point of debate, is that data collection and analysis by human rights organizations benefits from free software.
What free software provides human rights folks is a platform for doing specific kinds of work and letting a community improve that platform.
Here's a personal example: I'm developing a web based research and reporting system to track people who are kicked out of their HUD apartments for a drug or alcohol related arrest (not conviction) under the crazy One Strike law. We're both using free and open source tools and will, upon release in the near future, release this thing as quite modest free software.
The advantage is pragmatic: I can create a sophisticated system that other people can use to gather their own data on this subject and share/compare with ours. Are there nationwide trends and implications for this law beyond Chicago, the city where I work? Are there methods for analyzing this data that we're missing? Do other locales have specific pieces of information that we don't need to worry about in Chicago? Free software makes these questions easier to answer than proprietary software. Most of the mathematics required is stuff that any undergrad with numerical methods and statistical analysis under his or her belt can easily code, so that isn't really any issue.
It's a shame that the discussion on Slashdot thus far has been so hasty and angry, because even if it's a flawed article, it should really make people how they connect the "nerd" part of Slashdot with the "stuff that matters" part.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
The thing about "it widens the imbalance between the rich and poor" is pretty typical Marxist rhetoric, but for one little thing. Marx would probably say that "widening the imbalance" between rich and poor is a good thing, because things have to get worse before they can get better. Only when the world has hit rock-bottom, economically and socially, will the working people of the world wake up to their circumstances and bring in the True Revolution.
Or so Marx would say. It seems clear from history that Marx was wrong about just about everything. He seemed to base his reasoning on the assumption that the upper classes (the bourgeoisie-- cool, that's in my spell checker!) are inherently corrupt and that the working classes (the proletariat) are inherently noble. Thing is, though, that if you take somebody out of the working class and put him into the upper class, nine times out of ten he'll become a died-in-the-wool capitalist. Marx didn't count on this aspect of human nature.
So yeah, I agree with you. This is, in fact, just bullshit, but I think so for a slightly different reason. See, the capitalist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it creates a slope of upward mobility that all people can aspire to climb, thereby inspiring all sorts of good things that make the world a better place. And the socialist or communist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it will, sooner or later, bring about the Revolution that will make the world a better place. I don't know of a rationalized political philosophy that argues that inequity between classes is something you should oppose directly.
I think the author of this article was probably an amateur.
I write in my journal
Try reading the article next time. He never claimed that not releasing software under a Free Software or OSI-compliant license was a violation of human rights.
He said that its criticial that human rights organizations use Free Software for their existence. Human rights oganizations are short on money and can't afford to pay the outrageous costs for proprietary packages, especially when they don't work as well or aren't as stable as Free packages.
Compiling the financial issue, human rights organizations have serious problems keeping up to date with the draconian licenses imposed by software companies. EULA's can change at the companies whim, which is a serious problem for a human rights organization. Human rights organizations can't afford million dollar settlements with the BSA because they couldn't find licenses for every copy of Windows they own.
To save costs and avoid these headaches, and to use a more stable solution, human rights organizations should use free software.
The other issue is transparency. A fundamental thing for human rights is that processes be transparent. The first step to take away human rights -- as ICANN has showed us -- is to make a process non-transparent. Once something isn't transparent, you can do anything you want and no-one will know any better.
Current events in software have shown us again and again that you can't trust corporations with non-transparent processes. Whenever a corporation stands to benefit from abusing its lack of transparency, it does. Look at Enron and Global Crossings, the executives of which made secret deals outside the sight of their investors eyes, selling all their stock and making billions off of insider trading while they're investors wen't broke. Look at some of MS' latest EULA terms, which (for example) prevent you from using MS products to write/publish documents critical of MS. Look at MS' auto-update 'features' which force more and more draconian DRM 'features' on you.
Proprietary software does not necessarily mean human rights violations. However, its an excellent tool to use to disenfranchise voters. Its a great starting place for human-rights violations. Its a great weapon against human rights organizations. In short, because of its closed nature and the possibility of draconian EULA "agreements" there is a great potential for proprietary software to violate human rights.
Furthermore, I think there is a very good argument that Free Software should be a fundamental human right. Human rights are an expanding concept, and there's no reason why they shouldn't be expanded into the metaphysical. We only have the rights which we can defend, and we can extend rights beyond previous boundaries. In a hundred years, Free Software might be considered as much a human right as Free Speech.
Since when is wanting more freedom communism or stalinism? According to you, apparently, it is. What people like myelf and Richard Stallman want is more freedom in regards to software. That isn't a communistic ideal. That's an ideal of aspiring to freedom. I'd call it Libertarian.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Let me respond to a few misconceptions I believe you have.
1. TCO, when the total cost of ownership is less for proprietary products than for Free Software.
Firstly, I think it is very rare that the TCO for a proprietary package is less than that for a Free Software package.
Secondly, off the bat, most Free Software is at an advantage over proprietary software in terms of TCO because most Free Software happens to be free as in beer; it is the nature of Free Software in an internet era, that Free Software will also tend to be economically free.
Thirdly, considering the proprietary licensing issues, I think that proprietary software is never on average a better TCO solution than Free Software. It costs alot of money to maintain compliance with proprietary licensing which would sastify the BSA. And if the BSA raids your corporation and you can't prove you have lgally purchased a license for every copy of a proprietary product you're using, then you have to settle for a huge and outrageous price. So, with the BSA, any possible TCO advantage of proprietary software is gone.
2. Free software comes with zero support -- this is an important fact lost on most people who can support themselves.
Dead wrong.
Firstly, Free Software comes with free support provided internet access in the form of thousands of helpful newsgroups, message boards, etc etc. Furthermore, most developers of products are happy to lend support.
Secondly, one can purchase support for Free Software at a price better than one would have to pay for support for a proprietary product. Proprietary support isn't free; you either have to pay extra for it, or its built into the cost of the software you buy. So in most cases, if you want dedicated support, you'll get a better deal with Free Software since there's competition among support companies, unlike in the proprietary world.
Thirdly, have you looked at technical support for proprietary products lately? Its total and complete CRAP. I have a copy of WinME on my system to play games on. On the few occasions I've had to call technical support, I've gotten idiots who didn't know half of what I know:
ME: "WinME isn't working"
IDIOT: "Well, what did you install last"
ME: "JamCam for my digital camera"
IDIOT: "Well, uninstall it"
ME: "Ok, I uninstalled it. WinME still isn't workin"
IDIOT: "Ok, reinstall Windows ME."
This is basically the kind of support I got for one problem I called in with. Hence, my point. Technical support people for proprietary products don't know what the fuck they're doing or talking about. They're reading out of a cookbook, and they aren't authorized to help you if you don't have a "standard system" and they can only follow certain exact steps.
But in terms of human rights organizations. They simply can't afford to be wasting time dealing with the BSA's bullshit. The only time that a proprietary product has a lower TCO than its Free Software equivalent is when you've conveniently discounted the cost of dealing with the BSA.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen