I will use the proposal of the Government of Canada adopting, and participating in the development of, a Free Software Office Suite to offer one example of Free Software at work. I also hope that this proposal will be pushed by other GOSLING members.
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A modest proposal: Government of Canada Free Software Office Suite
Discussions of Free Software often get bogged down in confusion over the language used and how it can work. Software developers ask how they will get paid if the software is "free". At the same time, software users are not trusting Free Software because they believe that something that is "free" cannot be as good or better than something that is not.
I will use the proposal of the Government of Canada adopting, and participating in the development of, a Free Software Office Suite to offer one example of Free Software at work.
What is Free Software
To quote from the The Free Software Definition from the Free Software Foundation:
``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.
In a political context, Free Software is outside of the traditional concepts of "the left" and "the right". Specific language can be used that rings true for subscribers of most political philosophies.
For those on "the right", Free Software is simply an implementation of Free Market competition applied to Software. Free Software attempts to transform the software industry from one that focuses on products and has produced monopolies able to extract monopoly rents, to one that is services based where commercial players compete on merit rather than being favored as the incumbent.
For those on "the left", the Debian GNU/Linux project contains an explanation of What Does Free Mean?, and also contains a Debian Social Contract.
While different groups of people will have entirely different (and sometimes even conflicting) reasons for adopting and/or contributing to Free Software, it is still possible to work together on the same software.
The Proposal
The Government of Canada should redirect some of the money currently spent on software licenses to procuring Free Software based software services.
The Government of Canada is a large licensor of proprietary software. How much money is spent yearly is unfortunately not an easy question to obtain from the government, partly because this information does not seem to be tracked yet. If you agree with me that these numbers should be available, please contact your MP and ask for these numbers.
What we need is the ability to ask the government for things such as the average yearly license fees spent for a specific class of software product (IE: Office Productivity Suites), broken down by vendor and department.
To solidify this proposal, we will eventually need to get some numbers. I believe that the proposal can still be discussed without the numbers.
Take one large government department that currently licenses a proprietary office suite. There is a budget each year for paying the license fees for that suite. For a future budget year, rather than budgeting for paying licenses, the department would redirect that money toward improvements to some existing Free Software office suite.
There are a number of existing Free Software office suites. The most popular are OpenOffice.org, KOffice (Part of the KDE desktop project) and GNOME Office (Part of the GNOME desktop project).
OpenOffice.org becomes the obvious choice for the first stage of this project. It is already ported to multiple operating systems including GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and MacOS-X. It provides some of the best file conversion tools from legacy file formats such as Microsoft .DOC/.PPT/.XLS files. The native file format of OpenOffice.org is XML.
Assuming that OpenOffice.org is missing some features that the department needs, Canadian software developers can be hired to make the required improvements.
It is also possible to make use of existing members of the public sector to make these improvements. Since the software will remain Free Software the choice of public or private sector can be mixed as appropriate.(The advantages of Free Software for the public sector has not yet been understood by the public sector unions, nor the "dumbing down" of the public sector that proprietary software encourages).
It is my belief that the money saved on license fees from a single large government department would be sufficient to improve OpenOffice.org to the level required for deployment in that department. Until we have exact numbers for government license payments, and a list of features that any department feels are missing from OpenOffice.org, it is hard to prove my belief wrong.
What about other departments? Since the software can now be shared not only within that department, but with other departments and the rest of the world, cost savings can be achieved by more than just the department that funded the development. Each department may need to fund some extra software development in order to add all the features that they need, but the costs of these improvements would now be much lower than the costs of software licenses.
This is too radical! The Government will never go for it.
As someone outside of government, this may be a logical conclusion. There is information that the average citizen (and most parliamentarians) are missing in order to realize just how much infrastructure already exists to make this possible.
The Knowledge Exchange Service (KES, previously the Software Exchange Service) is part of Public Works and Government Services Canada. From their website they state:
The Knowledge Exchange Service is . . .
A free service aimed at knowledge professionals at all levels of government who want to share software, best practices, research and information to be more effective in their work, to leverage resources, and to stimulate cooperative effort in the government community.
"Knowledge shared, knowledge gained."
I became aware of KES because Chris Dodsworth, Senior Market Development Officer, gave a presentation at a Government of Canada hosted Open Source Solutions Showcase last May. Her talk was:
"Building on 15 years of facilitating government software reuse". An overview of this free IM/IT knowledgeware brokerage service's recent and planned enhancements and its proposed proactive role as a host for and gateway to government-produced open source software.
A quick look at their Partners page contains links to "Canada's partners pertaining to Open Source Products".
KES already shares government owned software within the government, and with other levels of government. The changes from this to being participants in the Open Source community are small.
- KES would need to include existing Free Software projects in their software catalog. I believe this work is already underway.
- KES would need to contribute government changes made to software back to the Free Software community. This would be a logical part of honoring the software license agreements.
- KES could be involved in helping Government departments publish government created software to the Free Software community. The Government of Canada has already published Free Software, with Simple Assets, Simple Tracker and OPA (Online Proposal Appraisal) being just a few examples.
- part of the license savings that the Government realizes should go into expanding the funding and mandate of KES.
What about software developers? How do they get paid if the software is now free?
Software can always be improved, and those that need those improvements will always be willing to pay someone to get their improvements.
If a software user is small (IE: not the Government of Canada), they may not be able to afford to fund the software improvement alone, but can fund a portion of the work in collaboration with others. They can even hire a company to manage the collaboration such that the customer does not need to think about how the work gets accomplished, just that it does and they pay their share.
Services around software such as training and technical support are always needed, regardless of whether the software is Free Software or not.
For the customer, there are advantages to paying for a value add services to software rather than purchasing a software product. If the current state of the software is "good enough", and they don't need any value added, why should they be paying more money?
While collecting royalties for work done in the past may appear to be beneficial to the software developer, the number of software developers are few compared to the number of people who are dependent on the use of software. Any savings that customers can make becomes money available to add new features to advance the state of software, or simply to go into improving the customers own business.
For our sector to receive respect from the general population, we need to move away from business models where we appear to be getting paid for nothing.
Customers saving money in our economy should not be seen as a threat to software developers. No matter how smart you are, you are a user of more software than you are a creator for, just as you are the recipient of more knowledge than you will ever be able to contribute back.
Copyright
Copyright 2002 Russell McOrmond <russell@flora.ca>
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Further reading
- Russell McOrmond: submission to the 2002 Canadian Innovation Strategy
- Russell McOrmond: submission to the 2001 Canadian copyright consultation
- Brendan Scott: Why Free Source Long Run TCO must be Lower
- Brendan Scott: Four Free Software Fallacies
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