Obama and Free Software

One of the more interesting aspects of the modern knowledge society is the free software movement. The most famous and influential leader of this movement is Richard M. Stallman (RMS). Richard recognized the value of a new model for software development and the various risks to that model. He also created a philosophical and ideological framework, and a new set of slogans, legal strategies and ideas to protect and promote the environment that would make free software more common and powerful. If Richard had not began his work in the 1980s, the Internet today would be less open, less innovative, and less useful.

In recent years the free software movement has grown in many different dimensions, and become much more diverse in terms of its leadership and approach. Playing an important role are Stallman critics like Eric Raymond or Bruce Perens[2], gifted software development leaders like Linus Torvalds, thousands of independently managed software development communities, corporate supported ventures like OpenOffice, MySql, Redhat or Ubuntu, and a host of influential academics like Eben Moglen or Yoachi Benkler. Today Google Scholar has 53,900 hits for the term "free software."[3]

[Clockwise: Obama ( Marc Nozell) and free software leaders Richard Stallman (Leonid Dmitriev), Eben Moglen (Andrew McMillan), Linus Torvalds (t3rmin4t0r), Bruce Perens (Manon Ress) and Michell Baker (Dead Squid). All photos available under licenses from Author, Wikimedia or Flickr]

While free software was once considered by some as a fringe movement, it is now mainstream. Fortune 500 companies are embracing free software programs like R to analyse data. Linux, Apache, MySql and PhP (LAMP) servers power much of the Internet. Many cell phones, Kindle 2, and other devices run Linux, an operating system that features much software developed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). [4] There is enormous interest in the development of every aspect of free software tools and applications. Some of the most profitable software companies today are those that are providing services over free software platforms. Free software also is important for empowering and protecting other social movements that routinely rely upon free software for a wide range of services.

The "free" part of the free software movement is an important element of this. The ability to innovate, and specifically to create innovations that serve social needs, is well served by platforms, like the Internet, that are based upon openness and freedom.

What does all this have to do with Obama? Actually, quite a bit.

As important as free software has become economically and socially, it gets almost no respect among U.S. political leaders. People should insist that elected and appointed government officials be more explicit about policies. I would start by asking the Obama Administration to answer the following initial questions:

Is free software important?

1. To what extent is free software used today?

2. What are the efficiency benefits of free software, in terms of allowing code to be freely reused and re-purposed?

3. What are the benefits of having software code transparent?

4. What are the benefits of users having the freedom to modify software to meet their needs?

5. Does free software play an important role in avoiding harm from the monopoly control over software products and platforms?

6. How much money do users save by using free software solutions?

7. Does free software make it easier for young people to learn about and contribute to the development of software?

Next, I would ask the Obama Administration to address certain policy questions relevant to procurement and government services:

8. Does government procurement policy recognize the benefits of free software solutions?

9. If so, do procurement policies encourage or discourage the supply and use of free software?

10. Does the Obama Administration recognize the strategic importance and value of interoperability and open standards in the software field?

11. Does the Obama Administration recognize the strategic importance of open standards for data formats?

12. Does the Administration have a strategy to support and promote interoperability and open standards, including open data formats? If so, what is this strategy?

13. To what extent can someone who uses free software fully interact with government agencies, such as by editing collaborative documents, using web based services, viewing multimedia content, or using government funded databases and services? Does the administration have a policy that e-government services should not compel citizens to use proprietary software?"

Grant Related Issues:

14. Does the federal Bayh-Dole Act provide the flexibility for the US government to insert appropriate conditions in grants that would increase public access to the software code developed under a government grant?

15. Should federal grants require recipients, when publishing or sharing data, to use open formats?

Competition Issues.[5]

16. Is the impact of a merger of the free software sector relevant to a proposed merger? For example, will the Obama Administration examine the impact of the Oracle acquisition of Sun on the future viability of MySQL, Java or OpenOffice?

17. Would an agreement among the owners of the two leading proprietary operating systems to not distribute software on the Linux platform be considered a violation of competition laws? If competition law is not a good tool to address such issues, what is?

18. Would an aggressive effort to break an open standard for data formats be considered a violation of competition law?

19. Should the dominant personal computing OS be required to offer a fair choice for Internet browsers?

Patent issues.

20. Should there be a zone of fair use for software patents when used in free software projects?

A lot of these issues are technical, but the issues are quite important economically and socially. The trick is to make these geeky issues political enough that politicians engage.

--Notes

[1]Yoachi Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J (2002); Yoachi Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press 2006). Eben Moglen, "Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright," First Monday (August, 1999)

[2] Richard Stallman's work is often available at http://www.fsf.org or http://www.gnu.org. Eric S Raymond's most well known work is "The cathedral and the bazaar: Musings on Linux and open source by an accidental revolutionary", 2001, O'Reilly & Associates. Bruce Perens work is available here: http://perens.com/policy/open-source/

[3]http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22free+software%22&btnG=Search

[4] The term Linux is often used as a generic term for Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. As noted by Wikipedia, "Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL and other free licenses." Richard Stallman and many others use the term GNU/Linux, to remind people of the importance of the many GNU GPL contributions.

[5] For the views of an influential person in the Free Software community, see George Greve's Considerations on Innovation and Competition Policy, A paper providing input to the workshop "Technical Regulation of the Internet : From Standardization to Behavorial and Societal Norms,, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/?p=309

Comments

[nxsryan]

For those interested in critiques regarding corruption and our public education system, in relation to the use of open source software (as compared to other, poorer countries), you will find this further reading meaningful:

Open Source Index reveals more than just usage stats: the sad case of technology education in the United States
http://news.northxsouth.com/2009/04/30/open-source-index-reveals-government-waste-and-corruption/

Public tech education in United States lags behind poorer countries
http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/07/01/public-tech-education-in-united-states-lags-behind-poorer-countries/

[jmpurser]

First off "free software" doesn't give you the ability to modify it. That's open source. That's an important distinction that also makes you google search meaningless.

I think you should get a clearer understanding of these two concepts before you decide to comment on what the government should be doing.

[RandVictims]

Microsoft has already bought off Washington. Why do you think that Congress, even during this economic crises, is going to increase the H1b limit?

Our politicians are destroying the U.S. in favor of China and India and nobody will do anything about it.

Free Software will be buried along side the tucker.

[weex]

The point you raise is one of government corruption which can stifle but not stop free software. It's important to educate people about the fact that digital restrictions and non-free software can create real barriers in their lives. It's already a challenge for many to remain lawful in the face of high software licensing costs. But beyond that, many businesses have no choice but to feed more money into a broken system since their data is locked up in proprietary file formats.

[KillTheMessenger]

Free software has already won. Even M$ knows it... they wouldn't be fighting so hard if they didn't believe that.

[TakeSake]

Here's my open source quandary. Please correct and explain where my reasoning is wrong.

1) Suppose I am working on software for an embedded product that is not Windows, Linux, etc. based.
2) Suppose there is functionality that would be easily implemented using software covered by GPL.
3) Suppose the "software" is a font - not actually executable code.
4) According to GPL, if I use part of that font in my product, all of the source must be made available under GPL.
5) There are many reasons not to do this. For instance, there are safety critical routines that, if changed due to misunderstanding or on purpose, can lead to dangerous situations.

It's one thing to improve a program and have it retain its primary functionality - it's another to use a segment of it to implement an ancillary part of it. Yet, under GPL, it's all treated the same.

[weex]

It's really up to the author of the font/project. In this case, the author has decided that they want their font/project to advance copyleft-protected free software programs only. If they were more interested in wide distribution they might have chosen the current BSD or MIT licenses or maybe LGPL. The thing is, for a small project you can go to the author and attempt to license it specifically for your project. The GPL uses copyright for enforcement and for a small project(with a manageable number of authors) it's possible to license your way out of it. That being said, have you considered releasing your hypothetical software under the GPL?

[KillTheMessenger]

Professionals always use the best tool to get the job done. In many cases that's open source software. In some cases it's simply not. I can only hope that our current government will learn a few lessons of the past and improve their procurement strategy. As for open source... it will thrive no matter what the government does. I am not worried in the least.

[jmpurser]

"Professionals always use the best tool to get the job done."

Okay, that's just funny!

[KillTheMessenger]

It stops being funny when you would love to have (e.g) open source EDA tools and there are none that pass even the most trivial laugh test. Open source can do a lot of things but if usually fails very badly when it comes to dedicated technological applications.

[canadapundit]

That's Linus Torvalds in the picture not Linux Torvalds, but I am sure he gets that all the time :)

[ThirdSection]

I remember a while ago that federal agencies were required to use UNIX-based operating systems for security sensitive computing. Does anyone know if this is still the case?

[jmpurser]

I heard the White House is still on Windows 2000 because they can't keep up with the security exploits in the newer products.

[KillTheMessenger]

I use Win 2000 at work. It's just as good as XP for professionals because it is XP without the user interface glamor and some of the multimedia and gaming drivers. For most applications Win 2000 and XP are completely interchangeable. And nobody, but absolutely nobody needs Vista, anyway.

[ThirdSection]

I suppose that's an argument to go back to the UNIX based systems then.

[canadapundit]

This looks like a "push-poll" to me. As a proponent of open-source software I am always dismayed to see ideology thrown into this debate. The community would be better served if it concentrated on making a better products than it's competitors. This is how Apache, Linux (servers), MySQL, and PHP have attained their market dominance and is how Firefox will accomplish the same.

This is also why Ubuntu and OpenOffice lag behind their proprietary competition. OSX and MS Office are better software. Handcuffing e-government IT departments is not a good way to promote efficiency and efficacy.

Many of these questions suggest that the government should apply ideological criteria to technical decisions. Does this mean that an IT person working for the government would not be able to select a technology based on what is the best tool for the job because a company happens to be earning revenue from it's development? You would think in these tough economic times that a government contract could be just what some struggling IT companies need.

One of the great standards behind the success of Linux servers is the "right tool for the job" approach of writing discrete and often elegant programs to handle very specific tasks. Applying that same approach to e-governement software procurement may mean that some open-source projects are simply not up to snuff.

It is the job of the administration to select the best tool for the job... regardless of the ideology behind it.

[Paul Lehto]

Umm, it is NOT the job of the administration to "select the best tool for the job.. regardless of the ideology behind it." It is the job of the administration to faithfully execute the laws, including the hightest laws of the land, our Constitution, inalienable rights and the principles of freedom and representative democracy.

It most decidedly IS the job of the administration to choose an "ideology-friendly" tool for the job, if we consider Freedom to be an ideology. I state this without prejudging per se whether "Free Software" lives up to the freedom billing, but clearly it is the administration's job to uphold Freedom.

As Harry Truman said, if you want efficiency (a key business value that often creates "best tools for the job", then "you will get a dictatorsh­ip." Truman's right. The first test for a governmental tool is whether it meets basic necessities of freedom and democracy. Surviving proposals, much like employees making the first cut after a resume' review of qualifications can then consider secondary considerations like efficiency and price.

Merely "choosing the best tool" will lead us to dispense with all-important basic requirements that keep our government freedom and democracy-­compliant, in favor of efficient dictatorship.

Whether or not "free software" meets the freedom test, the "ideology" of Freedom must be supported. Real american politics consists decides which proposal best achieves our shared values of freedom and democracy, not just identifying the tool to make trains run on-time.

[canadapundit]

I suppose this depends very much on what ideology we are talking about.

You think this post is about the ideology of freedom (although I'm not entirely sure you feel that way since you are unsure "weather or not free software meets the freedom test") while I feel this article is about pushing an anti-corporate ideology.

I agree with you and thought I was making the same point as you mention in the surviving proposal process. Criteria need to be met and once they are met secondary considerations like efficiency and price should be considered. I would think that the primary criteria should exclude anything that infringes about "Freedom" but I do not feel that an anti-corporate ideology should be part of the primary or secondary considerations.

I guess "regardless of ideology" was too broad a statement. I suppose I should have said "without an anti-corporate bias."

[weex]

Thank you very much for writing about Free Software in the context of the political world. As Richard Stallman would say, free software is designed to solve the social problem that is proprietary software. Non-free software divides users and makes them powerless to help one another.

It's great to see so many people interested in free software but getting political and governmental recognition(in terms of purchasing software solutions) is essential for the future of the movement. I'm attempting to tell more people about free software through a podcast at TryGNULinux.com.

Get involved in any way you can. Software is different than any other tool man has developed. It costs almost nothing to copy and makes little sense for it to be anything but free.