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By Russell McOrmond on 18 July 2007 - 9:21am

A bit of a thread started as comments to another BLOG article, but I wanted to highlight the topic. There are a few recent media files I think people should listen to to understand the connection between Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Green Party principles/policies. It is important for Greens to realize that this is not simply a way to save money on software (any more than reducing environmental wast is only a way to save money), but that like other Green policies it has positive impacts on many other aspects on our global society. In many ways, this global movement isn't really about software at all, and really about better answers to some of the most basic moral and economic questions of our time.

The Green Party Radio for July 17 includes an interview of Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative.

Professor Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center delivered a lecture in Edinburgh, Scotland 26th June 2007 titled "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3".

In some ways this could be seen as a follow-on lecture to "Software and Community in the Early 21st Century" which he gave in October 2006 to a technical community, with this one more aimed at a legal/legislative community.


Selected quotes from "Software and Community in the Early 21st Century"
So that was how the twentieth century thought about collaboration in the economy: it made steel. And from steel it made the rest of what the twentieth century possessed for the exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit.

The twenty-first century economy is not undergirded by steel. The twenty-first century economy is undergirded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the twenty-first century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth. We have moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in the developed world, will continue to move throughout the developing economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it

...
And so we face, in the twenty-first century, a very basic moral question. If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, "What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them", has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. We just don't know who to charge for the crime.

If there are any further thoughts, discussion, questions, please add as comments as I believe this to be a very important topic Greens should be fully informed on.

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Let's floss this one

Submitted by Jonathan Meijer on 18 July 2007 - 11:30am.

Hi Russell,

I'm glad you bring up the question of software and Open Source. It is certainly barely ever touched in the media.

Though Open Source is how many children will get the $100 Laptop in the near future, in a country like Canada where the 'professional' version of a popular operating system costs perhaps $400 per government computer and there are nearly 400,000 employees of the federal government (let's assume there's one computer per employee), substantial savings (for the taxpayer) can result from switching to an Open Source operating system. Using one of the many flavours of Linux can also run on older computers, not the brand new ones many government departments get every year, thereby saving even more money per computer (expect $1-2k per computer, much more for servers), and also not filling up the landfills!

Jonathan Meijer
Gatineau

Jonathan Meijer - Gatineau

One Laptop Per Child.

Submitted by Russell McOrmond on 18 July 2007 - 12:03pm.

Check out the OLPD project at Laptop.org project. While aimed at so-called "developing nations", we are all at the end of the day developing when it comes to education. This project is more of an educational project than a technical project, leveraging the right technology and the right knowledge development methodologies (including FLOSS) to accomplish their goals.

I look forward to similar technology and software/etc being deployed in Canada.

As to government usage, one of the groups I work with is the Getting Open Source Logic INto Government (GOSLING) community. The major savings comes not from reducing licensing costs of infrastructure software, but reducing ongoing costs associated with government authored software. FLOSS methodologies where the government collaborates on previously exclusively government owned sofwtare is critically important (resource multiplication, spinoffs, better internal and external support possibilities, etc).

Intellectual Resources Canada (Ressources Intellectuelles Canada), an emerging inter-departmental/inter-sectoral initiative to rationalize public spending on custom intellectual assets, including software. One of the first projects on this site is "ITERation" (IT for Expenditure Reporting Automation) which is a FLOSS project to help the government figure out how much money is being spent, and on what (You might be surprised how badly this has been done in the past).

See: ITBusiness.ca: Feds put open source into active service

It will be great to eventually know how much money the Federal government is spending on software now (they don't know), so that we will know exactly how we can save taxpayer money by modernizing methodologies.

---
Russell McOrmond (Constituent, Ottawa South)
Check out my BLOG on Digital Copyright Canada.

--- Russell McOrmond (Constituent, Ottawa South) Check out my BLOG on Digital Copyright Canada.