Huffpo Obama and Free Software

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: James Love <james.love () keionline org>
Date: May 9, 2009 6:52:20 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Huffpo Obama and Free Software

Dear Dave,

After spending way too much time sorting out formatting problems with
the collaborative editing of a document (people were using different
vintages of Microsoft Word and I was using OpenOffice), I was motivated
to write this for the Huffington Post. Jamie


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/obama-and-free-software_b_201166.html

Obama and Free Software
Huffington Post
James Love, May 9, 2009

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]

[Pictures, clockwise: Obama ( Marc Nozell) and free software leaders
Richard Stallman (Leonid Dmitriev), Eben Moglen (Andrew McMillan), Linux
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. 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?

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 to publish and share data
in open standardized formats?

Competition Issues.

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?

Patent issues.

19. 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] Eric S Raymond, The cathedral and the bazaar: Musings on Linux and
open source by an accidental revolutionary, 2001, O'Reilly & Associates.
http://perens.com/policy/open-source/

[3]http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22free+software%
22&btnG=Search
--  
James Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology International
http://www.keionline.org | mailto:james.love at keionline.org
Wk: +1.202.332.2671 | US Mobile +1.202.361.3040 | Geneva Mobile  
+41.76.413.6584





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