Guideline for contacting public institutions on solving the proprietary advertisements from their website
Table of contents
Schedule
Making governements or public institutions change their website can be
a long process. First of all, please keep in mind that your are very likely
to be the very first one with this request and most employees in the institutions
might not have a clue what you are talking about. Please in all your communication
to the institutions be polite, calm but persistent.
Bear in mind that we want public institutions to remove the advertisement
for reasons of incompatibility of the work of the public service with advertising
activities. If they disagree with this statement, we want them to give a
choice in the download, namely in linking to pdfreaders.org on the ground
that they have to protect only the freedom of competition, not the monopoly
in place of some software companies. Lastly, we want to explain public
institutions the advantages of Free Software, particularly the fact that
it is vendor neutral and thereby contribute to the independence of the public
service.
This guideline intends to help you step by step in the process of
contacting the institutions, please follow them with scrutiny :
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Contact us: If you want to help contacting the institutions,
please send us a mail telling us in which country you wish to contribute,
and how many institutions you think you can contact. We will then send you
a list of institutions with their post adresses for which you will be responsible.
This is very important for we don't want to duplicate the efforts in
contacting twice the same institution (which could also make it grow angry
at us). Just send a mail at pdfreaders@lists.fsfe.org.
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Prepare the letter: This is the easiest step. You will
find below a model letter to contact the institutions. Chose the one in the
language corresponding to your country, replace the address field with the
post address of the institutions you are to contact,
print it. Go the the petition page,
pick your language, print it, one exemplary for each institution. Send both
the letter and the petition.
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Remain available for contact: The institutions are very
likely to have questions. We've tried to sum up below a list of the most
likely ones to come up. If you are unable to respond to one question of
the institutions, send us a mail or call us. In any case, try to be as helpful
and patient as possible with the institutions and be ready to explain them
the basics of why they shouldn't do advertising for a private brand.
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Watch out: If/Once you get the confirmation by the
institution that it has removed the advertising or added also a link to
free PDFreaders, take the time to go on the website and make sure that
they've done it, and not only on the page we reported but for the whole
website. If it is not the case, please contact them again, thanking for
the effort and asking for them to be coherent in their policy.
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Report us your success : If they have indeed removed
the advertisings or added also a link to free PDFreaders, send them a mail
to thank them and send a mail at pdfreaders@lists.fsfe.org
so that we can add a closing date for the bug.
Model letter
Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
Linienstr. 141
10115 Berlin
Germany
Name of the institution
Postal address
Country
Subject : Advertising for proprietary software on your website
Since 2001 the FSFE has been creating awareness for the questions of
equal participation in the information age, as well as freedom of competition,
namely in promoting Free Software. On September 13th 2010, the FSFE started
an awareness campaign to sensibilize the public to the problem that advertisings
for non-free PDF-readers on public websites represent for the free competition,
the neutrality of the state and the open standard PDF.
During one month, we have collected thanks to a huge number of volunteers
[FIXME : number of bugs] institutions, of which [FIXME : number in the designated country]
being in [FIXME : name of the country] whose websites advertise for one
single PDF reader, one proprietary reader. Our core concerns with these
practices are twofold :
- Firstly, the text of the advertisings is both inaccurate and prejudiciable
for the competitors, in that it openly declares that the advertised software
is the only available option to open the PDF files.
- Secondly, by advertising on their websites, governments are favorizing
one software of a private company and are thereby hindering the free competition
in that they priviledge one software, in the present case one software and
one business model, over the others.
Nowadays, several alternatives to the proprietary software that are
usually advertised on the governmental website exist. In declaring that
citizens "need" to download this or that programm to open the PDF file
they want to read is in a way disguising the reality that alternative exist.
Free alternatives, or even smaller proprietary alternative software are
ejected from the market because they cannot get as well known as the mainstream
one. In protecting the oligopole of a very few number of proprietary PDFreaders
producing companies, public institutions are putting their freedom in jeopardy
for they could end up having only one single vendor, and be locked in towards
him. Worse, they are disregarding their obligation to be market neutral.
We understand that most citizens are not familiar with the variety of
software that exist and want to be proposed a simple way of opening the
file they want to have access to. But we require that the proposition of
one PDF reader is not done in an exclusive way. A correct sentence would
be to say "to open this PDF file, you need to have a PDF reader. You can
download here one of these software (list is not exhaustive)". FSFE has
tried to gather a list of Free Software PDF readers,
so that public institutions can propose both softwares : the proprietary
and free ones.
We consider this last point as a very crucial one. Free Software
is software that grants four freedoms to the user : to use, study, share
and improve the software. We believe that particularly public institutions
should be able to audit for security problems the software they use. To do
this, they must be able to see the source code and they must be able to
modify it to fix any problems they find, and they must be able to compile
it and use their new modified version. That's one of the reasons why we are
convinced that Free Software is better for society and why public institutions
should encourage their citizens to rather use this type of software.
Furthermore, in the particular case of the PDF readers, the implementation
of the Open Standard PDF is not always in compliance with the criteria of
the standard. Public institutions should also pay attention to the fact that
they release their documents in a format that is compliant with the Open
Standard PDF, without any proprietary extension of it to make sure that
everybody can in the end open them. Another problem with these extension
is that it makes it difficult for competitors to present themselves as
performant for they are made to open the standard and not some extended,
non-free version of it.
For all these reasons, we think that it is much preferable for public
administrations not to promote a single, private, proprietary software on
their websites. We demand that these advertisings are replaced with a neutral
indidcation, either by not naming any software or by giving the choice between several
softwares of several business models.
We would like to thank you for considering these points, and hope that
you will change your website according to our remarks. We of course remain
available to provide further explanation and help to do this change.
Kind regards,
Karsten Gerloff
President, Free Software Foundation Europe
FAQ
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Why is it a problem that public websites make a reference to one proprietary software ?
We see several problems here :
- Neutrality of the state : Any software is a product and a service. The state has to warrants the freedom of competition in the market and therefore is not supposed to advertise for one software over another. In promoting one software, the state protects the monopoly of this company and makes it difficult for competitors to propose their own software
- Fallacies of the ads : The websites often present the proprietary software saying "to read this PDF file, you need to download program X". This is false in that you don't need this particular software, since alternatives exist (see "Where can I find free PDF readers"). A correct sentence would be "to open this PDF file, you need to have a PDF reader. You can download here one of these software (list is not exhaustive)"
- Proprietary software are not in the best interest of society : see "Why are Free Software better for Society"
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Freeware is not Free Software:Proprietary software, even if they are free of charge, do not satisfy the caracteristics of Free software. Refer to our definition of Free Software.
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What is the problem in having one single software if it is free of charge ? Wouldn't it be free of charge, it would be clear that the state cannot impose you to buy something to read their documents, this would infringe the right to access to their information. The danger in having one single company, and thereby one single vendor, is to end up with a situation where all possible competitors would be excluded de facto from the market, and the vendor would then be in place to change its software, for their will be no competitor. It could change the format, it could even make its software expensive, or the other way around it could go bankrupt and totally disappear, giving no more possibility to have its software. For reasons of independency of one single vendor, competition, and right to have a choice, it is important that more than one software exist on the market.
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Why are Free Software better for society ? questions of security ; question of right to chose ; of independence ; of democracy, explain why Free Software is vendor neutral..
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Where can I find free PDFreaders ? We have gathered a list of these software at pdfreaders.org. The institutions have the possibility to directly link to this page using the buttons.
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What is the PDF format? The Portable Document Format is a originally a format developped by Adobe in 1993, that was afterwards released as an open standard for documents exchange (ISO 15930-1:2001, ISO 19005-1:2005, ISO 32000-1:2008).
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What caracterizes an Open Standard ? According to our definition, an Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is
- subject to full public assessment and use without
constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
- without any components or extensions that have dependencies
on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an
Open Standard themselves;
- free from legal or technical clauses that limit its
utilisation by any party or in any business model;
- managed and further developed independently of any single
vendor in a process open to the equal participation of
competitors and third parties;
- available in multiple complete implementations by competing
vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to
all parties.
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Why aren't all free PDF readers as performant as the proprietary counterparts, namely Adobe ? This question is twisted. All major free PSF readers are able to open and read files that comply to the PDF standard. The fact is that the implementation of the standard by some companies is not framed enough, so that the extensions added on the formats of the file no longer respect the standard, and can only be read by programs that know the code of this other extension. The problem is not that the readers canot read the file, but that the editors do not respect the format.
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Is there a translated downloading interface for these software ? Well not yet, but we are working on it...