Subject : Advertising for proprietary software on your website
During its campaign about advertisements for proprietary PDF readers on public websites, the FSFE has received a report designing your institution as one of the [FIXME : number of bugs] institutions, whose websites advertise for one single PDF reader, one proprietary reader. By advertising, we mean "the act or practice of calling public attention to one's product, service, need, etc.". In the present case, it as about naming and linking to the download interface of one single PDF reader software, a proprietary one. That the software is gratis does not change the fact that your website advertise for it. Our core concerns with this practice are twofold :
Free Software, as their proprietary counterparts, are products and services that are equally able to deal with PDF documents. 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. A correct and non-discriminatory 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)".
For now, 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 and to protect the free competition in the market.
FSFE has gathered a list of Free Software PDF readers, so that if public institutions insist in proposing some products, they propose both software types : the proprietary and free ones.
Furthermore, in the particular case of the PDF readers, 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. As long as they support privatory companies, public institutions potentially support the irregular use of the standard by means of adding extensions. They prejudice thereby the Free Software developpers who don't have access to the privatory extensions : the Free Software readers will be performant in dealing with the standard, but will be disadvantaged because the mainstream use made of the format is not compliant with 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 removed, or at least 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. We join to this letter the petition we left open to signature during our campaign, with the list of the [FIXME : number] signatories.
Kind regards,
Karsten Gerloff
President, Free Software Foundation Europe
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