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Brazilian Gov't May Pass Pro-Free Software Law
Kaufmann writes "More news from Brazil... this time it seems to be good news, though; this page describes a law project, already on Congress, which, if approved, will obligate all sectors of the Brazilian Government - agencies, public corporations, et cetera - to use only free (as in speech) software (unless there is none that provides the required functionality). This is rather surprising news, considering the incredible power wielded by Big Software Companies in Brazil (their puppet, the Brazilian Association of Software Corporations, is conducting a massive anti-"piracy" witch hunt, with some success). Email the author of the bill, congressman Walter Pinheiro, and show him your support! (Most links are in Portuguese; you might want to use your favourite text translation tool.) "
This is interesting... Slashdot is encouraging citizens of other countries to try to affect decisions in nations not of their immediate concern. Why should a Brazilian representative care about what some fool in New York thinks? Great, the rest of the world supports it, but his constituents just care about getting those damn strip miners out of their backyard.
The CD-R tax story from a couple days ago also comes to mind. Non-canadians are probably signing it with something like "Toronto, Ontario" so that the petition people can say "this many canadians voted for it" and then the officials can reply, "there aren't even that many people in that city."
I'm all for the ideals behind the story, but I'm curious as to what influence a non-national has over a delegatory representative...
-- adraken
It makes use on the use of programs opened for the beings of public law and private law under shareholding control of the public management.
Article 1 - the public management, in all the levels, them To be able of the Republic, the state-owned companies and of mixing economy, the public companies, and all the too much public or private organisms under control of the Brazilian society, is obliged to use foreground, in its systems and equipment of computer science, opened, free programs of restriction proprietor how much its cession alteration and distribution.
Article 2 - that one Is understood for opened program whose license of industrial or intellectual property does not restrict under no aspect its cession, distribution, use or alteration of its original features.
Article 3 - the open program must assure to the using the unrestricted to its code source, without any cost, with sight to modify program, integrally, if necessary access, for its perfectioning. Only Paragraph. A code source must be the foreground feature used by the programmer to modify the program, not being allowed to dim its accessibility, nor neither to introduce any intermediate form as output of a daily pay-processor or translator.
Article 4 - the license of use of the open programs must allow modifications and derived works and its exempt distribution under the same terms of the license of the original program.
1 - the license will only be able to restrict the distribution of the code source in form modified in case that it allows to the distribution of programs modified jointly with the code original source, objectifying the alteration of the program during the compilation process.
2 - source Must allow also the distribution of program compiled from the modified code explicitamente, being able in such a way to demand that the derived programs have different names or version numbers, that differentiate them of the original.
Article 5 - it will not be able to have clause in the license that implies in any form of discrimination the people or groups.
Article 6 - No license could specific for be determined product, making possible that the extracted programs of the original distribution have the same guarantee of free alteration, distribution or use, that the original program.
Article 7 - the licenses of open or restricted programs, will not restrict other programs distributed jointly.
Article 8 - the licitatórios certames that objectify to do business programs of computer with the beings specified in the article 1 of this law, will have obligatorily to be conducted by the principles established in this legislation.
Article 9 - 1 will only be allowed to the use for the beings of the article, of programs of computer whose licenses are not in agreement with this law, in the absence of open programs that do not contemplate content it the solutions object of the public licitation.
JUSTIFICATION It has more than fifteen years argues in the whole world the free manipulation of the computer programs or " free software ". In 1984 proprietor, supplied by means of restrictive licenses of ample specter was impossible to use a modern computer without the installation of an operational system. Nobody had permission to freely share programs (software) with other users of computer, and hardly somebody could change the programs to satisfy its operational necessities specific.
The design GNU, that dates of the beginning of the Movement of free Software, was established to change this. Its first objective was to develop a compatible portable operational system with the UNIX that would be free 100% for alteration and distribution, providing to the users who contributed with its development and alteration of any part of its original constitution.
Technical GNU is as UNIX, but it differs from the UNIX for the freedom that if it provides to its users. For the confection of this opened program, many years of work had been necessary, for hundreds of programmers, to develop this operational system. In 1991, the last more important component of a similar system to the UNIX was developed: LINUX.
Today the combination of GNU and the Linux is used for million of people, of free form, in the whole world.
This program is only one example of as the freedom in the alteration, distribution and use of programs of computer to be able to transform still more quickly, and in more democratic way, the profile it social and technological development in the world. The State, as fomentador being of the technological development and the democrátização of the access the new technologies for the society, cannot be to steal its responsibility to prioritize the use of open programs or " free software / open source ". E if small, the average and great companies multinationals already are adopting opened programs, thus preventing the payment of hundreds of million of dollar in licensing of programs, because it would have the State, with a infinity of devoid social causes of features, to continue buying, and expensive, the programs of market.
We all love free software... but personally I don't like the idea of forcing it. I'll admit forcing people to use free software does have some useful applications... no backdoored programs for example. I wasn't able to make much sense out of the article... I speak spanish, english, german, not portuguese. Anyway I don't think that "forced" and "free software" should be in the same sentence. The idea of free software is freedom, isn't it?
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Heh! Slow down!
Open Source Software is a wonderful thing, for innumerable reasons, but I'm not sure upper management(i.e. Congress/Parliament/Whoever) should be mandating its usage any more than it should be mandating its avoidance.
Res Ipsa Loquitar--Let The Facts Speak For Themselves. In this case, let the value of the software speak for itself--I'm a hardcore advocate of Open Source, but let the engineers on the front lines make the technical decisions, not someone whose top priority is to Cut The Budget. It's one thing to have a policy that explicitly states that it's acceptable--even encouraged--to use (L)GPL'd code for your projects. It's quite another thing to demand it, and to stigmatize the use of anything else.
Closed Source code shouldn't be presumed better because it costs many; Open Source shouldn't be presumed better just because it's free. Let the engineers be free to make their choices regarding what to use--hopefully, the track record of our development model, the quality of our code, and the immutability of our support(hi, RSA) will convince them to operate within the system we've created.
I'd rather convince the engineers than threaten their jobs. But that's my opinion.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Engineers need funding. I work in the private sector, and in order for me to buy software for my network, I must first accrue(sp?) the funds.
In a government model, these same funding decisions are made by the Government (i.e. Congress/Parliament/Whoever).
I would like the funding and the freedom to make the decision that best solves the problem, and this kind of legislation (passed or defeated) calls attention to a software development model that we all should be using.
In our public university, the witch hunt has began. Last month, there was a big shift of operating systems on machines. A lot of machines changed from NT to Linux. Our lab, was the only which used mostly linux for research, and so we gave a lot of support to the other people. It was a lot of work, but we did meet a lot of new people. :)
Sorry for the bad translation of the law, but I hope you can get the idea.
I would like the funding and the freedom to make the decision that best solves the problem, and this kind of legislation (passed or defeated) calls attention to a software development model that we all should be using.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing at all.
I want you, as an engineer, to have the funding to best solve a problem. Maybe that funding means that you'll devote five man-months to improving the SCSI stack on Linux, or maybe it means you'll just buy a farm of Solaris machines.
Whatever you do, the decision should be made on technical grounds, based upon available resources and the ability for you to amortize the value of the project across multiple tasks, departments and maybe even agencies. Open Source has some definite advantages here! But those are advantages for the engineers to evaluate, not for the long-disconnected politicians to order them to choose, unless they're willing to put their jobs on the line saying what's out there Just Isn't Good Enough.
If Microsoft got a law passed ordering departments to only use the most popular closed source software available, it'd be wrong. The opposite, in my mind, is also true.
That being said, there is assuredly resistance at the direct managerial level above the engineers that makes free software a touchy subject. That resistance should also disappear, but not by mandate of law, but by sheer fact that the reasons behind that resistance are antiquated and just no longer valid.
I'll admit, this is a very strange side for me to be taking, and actually feels kind of out of character, but I just don't feel it's right to speak of freedom and higher quality software out of one side of my mouth while mumbling about forcing the use of free software unless there's nothing that even comes close to finishing the job out of the other.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Here are some issues to consider:
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Well, first of all, I would like to make a few comments, as KGBear does sometimes :):
1) We are not talking about explicit open source software. It is FREE. The source is closed? It doesn't matter. If they can give us, we will use it. That's the idea.
2) Probably that will save huge amounts of money, of course. But there is a lot of piracy, even into the government (many agencies have illegal copies of very expensive software). That will keep going.
3) The lack of supervision will probably throw this law into complete dust. Who will be assuring people are using 'as much as there is possible' of free software? What will be the _penalties_ for people running commercial software? Those questions intrigate me.
Now to the good point. This will lead to something very very good, and completely new: thousands of people using software like *nix. That will make the understanding of such systems much more common between everyone. And, we all know no jobs will vanish from such acts. Software bought was bought. Future software running will be free, and programmers won't have to work more (or less) so they can sell his new applications. If the functions of the program are very needed, like, let's say, PhotoShop (there is always GIMP =D), the program will be bought. What I mean is, good programmers will always have their places.
So, concluding: why not? less budgets, and, besides, just wonder how much people will begin using real os'es? how many people will get to know the real possibilites his computer had but he never experienced?
I think some other countries should take a look at the idea.