Free as in Free Market
In his thoughtful post, The free software way, Richard Fontana (open source licensing and patent counsel at Red Hat) highlights the importance of the bundle of legal rights that make software “free as in freedom”. These are the broad freedoms that users have to view the source, copy, modify and redistribute the software. The four freedoms, embodied in licences such as the GPL, are the foundation on which our rights as users rest. He points out that the term “Open Source” fails to capture the central idea of this bundle of rights.
But are these rights enough?
The Public Sector Remix project, aimed at bringing contestability back to the public sector desktop, highlighted the importance of what I have come to think of as “the fifth freedom”—it’s not enough for the software to be free, the documentation must be free too. On the desktop, this means adopting not just a free software stack, it means adopting open standards in general and ODF in particular.
It is encouraging to read that Danish state administrations will adopt ODF and let’s hope New Zealand follows their lead sooner rather than later.
But why would a business user care about software freedom? For customers, free-as-in-free-speech software delivers free-as-in-free-market software. As a consequence of the 4 software freedoms, customers get 4 business freedoms:
- Choice: freedom to choose software that does not dictate a particular vendor or require a particular infrastructure
- Independence: freedom from lock-in or vendor capture so that we can enter and exit technologies based on business needs
- Flexibility: freedom of action so that choices made today don’t limit our choices tomorrow or require others to make the same choices we have made
- Control: freedom to control the software and use or modify it as we see fit, and to collaborate or share with others
Proprietary software is designed to take away the 4 business freedoms. Buyers considering proprietary alternatives to free software need to be sure that any short term benefits exceed the long term costs.
John,
There is a little bit more to the Danish announcement than you mentioned. To quote the IDG report in the CIO magazine:
“The Danish Parliament has decided on a set of rules to which open document formats must adhere if they are to be used by state authorities after April 1, 2011, Denmark’s Liberal Party said on Friday.
The agreement isn’t about restricting users to one office suite, or choosing between the ODF (OpenDocument Format) or OOXML (Office Open XML) standards. Rather, the Danish Parliament has agreed on the criteria that open document formats must meet, the Liberal Party said.
Approved formats must be recognized by an internationally known standards body such as the International Organization for Standardization, and they must be fully documented. It must be possible to implement the format on different computing platforms.
A panel of experts will now start working on list of which formats actually meet the criteria, and can approved for use by state authorities, according to the statement.
The Danes are pushing hard for the use of open standards, and the agreement will help solidify it as one of the world leaders in the field, the Liberal Party said.”
http://www.cio.com/article/527258/Danish_Parliament_Sets_Rules_for_Open_Document_Formats
For an actual translation of the report see:http://notes2self.net/archive/2010/01/29/an-update-on-document-formats-in-denmark.aspx
Kind Regards,
Mark Rees