Peru Passes Free Software Law

wlan0 writes "Peru has passed a law favoring Open Source in the Government (translated using Google translator) after some time and some fights thanks to the help of Peruvian Congressman Villanueva and APESOL(Peruvian Free Software Association). OpenSource.org also provides the full text of the Bill."

Comments

Re:This is not the way to do it

[SharpFang]

Yes. And they did.
The governments of several South American governments have realized this already, that software used for all the government purposes should follow these guidelines:
- Be transparent to the government. The government MUST have a way to verify if no malicious code, country-hostile elements, backdoors or other such insecurities exist. Without source - impossible.
- Be transparent to the citizens; any citizen of the country should be able to analyse and examine how the government handles the data, verify that no illegal activity is being performed using the software. Required: Access to sources, access to specifications.
- Countrywide Integration: Any citizen should be able to integrate systems used in government with systems they use privately, (e.g. in private business - taxes) to increase efficiency, removing need of manual conversion between two closed standards or such. Req: Open standards, access to hooks/API.
- Free access for citizens to the software. No need to sign NDAs, no fees to access the sources, freedom to use and examine the software at will. If they pay taxes to fund the software for government, they shouldn't be forced to pay again to use it themselves. Req: Free as a beer, no "don't copy" style licenses.
- Indepence from vendors. The country can't be held hostage by any vendor because they are the only entity that can implement/change/fix some essential feature. Any developer should be able to come along the way and continue the work, where the previous one left it. Req: Access to sources.
- Supporting local economy: Making development of software for government, easy for local businesses, no matter what their size. Because anyone can develop the software, the government isn't tied to a single corporation creating the subsystems and won't be locked with expanding underperforming system because cost of total replacement is too high and there's nobody else besides the corporation that could fix the software (and the corporation lacks skill/resources to do this). Req: Access to sources for everyone.

As for now, Open Source/Free Software fulfills all these requirements "out of the box". Getting them all from any commercial vendor would be near-impossible, or at least a true torment in the means of negotiations.
Also note it doesn't lock out any commercial vendors. It just changes what the government buys: They buy THE software (binaries+sources+specs+IP) and not just license to use the "borrowed" binaries which they wouldn't really own.
What the government does with the purchased software shouldn't be your concern, you got paid for selling all rights to it to them. Well, they open-source it. For the better of the nation.