On Mon, 2010-09-13 at 13:18 +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
It has been demonstrated time and time again that it is not possible to completely privatise the machinery of government and simultaneously hold it completely democractically accountable. It is necessary to realise that non-free software in government is as much of a black box system as an outsourced service. In most places, some services of government are not allowed to be outsourced. So equally, some software used by government should not be allowed to be proprietary.
I think you've made exactly the same leap that Carsten made. You can argue in favour of things like transparency and value, but mapping that to the software freedoms isn't straightforward.
If we take that argument at face value, what we're saying is that for any Government website (as an example), people should have the right to run a modified version of it for their commercial purposes that have nothing to do with the Government data. It would be interesting to see the construction of an argument that those freedoms are necessary for good governance.
Of course procuring free software can fulfil these requirements (so long as they behave as a good free software citizen, which is a different topic) but to say that is the _only_ way you can fulfil those things is a much harder case to make.
Isn't this why the US has some requirement for government works to be outside copyright restrictions? If it's even accepted there...
I think that has more to do with the taxpayer not paying twice for the same thing. It's a real shame we don't have that in Europe too, it's the same for public data over there too, but I think it's a different argument: if we're saying the Government shouldn't publish and license proprietary software to taxpayers, I think that's a much easier argument to make.
Cheers,
Alex.
-- This message was scanned by Better Hosted and is believed to be clean. http://www.betterhosted.com