On 25.08.2017 19:59, hellekin wrote:
- Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]:
we are preparing a campaign named "Public Money Public Code". The aim of this campaign is to ask all the public authorities in Europe that develop software inhouse or that pay external software development and finance or co-finance the development with public funds, to release the software under a Free Software licence.
I've been working on a philosophical argument that distinguishes free technologies from proprietary technologies on a technical basis. This offers a foundation to argue, along with the PMPC campaign, that European institutions, and more generally public institutions, should prefer open technical systems to closed technical systems [...]
This is great work, thanks! Looking forward to reading more.
I just yesterday finally picked up a copy of "The Comingled Code" by Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman. The subtitle of the book is "Open Source and Economic Development", so it is not about technical arguments, nor philosophical arguments, nor morals.
Ultimately, I believe a successful "Public Infrastructure" campaign needs to also look at economical arguments _against_ Free Software, and carefully dissect and refute these arguments.
To illustrate the problem, let me quote from the final section of that book, the "Takeaways":
# Implications for Government Officials
There is no right answer. Despite the well-understood imperfections of the software market, we find no reason to believe that market mecha- nisms inherently favor either type of software. Under these conditions, and given the serious hazards of governments trying to pick winners, it is appropriate to let competition (controlled, of course, by competi- tion law) and the decentralized choices of diverse economic agents do their jobs.
More specifically, government officials need not—and should not—favor either open source or proprietary software. Rather, they should maintain a neutral stance toward the way in which software is licensed, devel- oped, and procured. There are many reasons for encouraging com- petition between open and proprietary software. Open source and proprietary software differ on many dimensions, including such crite- ria as functionality, cost, quality, and product evolution. These con- siderations are each likely to require careful assessment. To consider the last-mentioned criteria, for instance, open source software gives the user access to the underlying software code—thus there is no danger that the software will be ‘‘snatched away’’ because of the change of a corporate strategy. But the development of future versions of open source programs will be a function of its ability to attract the interest of individual and corporate contributors. When encouraging the development of a local computer industry, government officials should let firms weigh these complex considerations and choose the model of software development that they find most appropriate. Rec- ommending that governments should encourage competition, how- ever, is not the same thing as arguing that they should not be involved in regulating the software industry.
When funding the development of software, whether for their own use or as a more general R&D effort, government officials need to apply a different calculus as opposed to private entities. In particular, the same issues, such as cost and quality, should be weighted, but government officials must also take into account the benefits to society. This implies that different countries may make different choices. For instance, a small country might want to take advantage of further improvements by others to its software and would be more inclined to fund open source projects with licenses that limit commercial utilization, such as the General Public License. In a large country with a dynamic software industry, government officials may wish to make it easier for commercial firms to benefit from publicly funded research and development. (Indeed our survey findings suggest that countries in the real world do make different choices.)
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