[FSFLA] Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign

Dom Ago 27 18:52:03 UTC 2017

Dear Hellekin,

i support your proposal to Open Sorce Technology, the condition for a 
real technical development. And your strong answer to Moritz.

Moritz is a german boy. And in Germany all governments groups on any 
level look for money flow. This is the base for the big corruption in 
Germany in the political spheres. And this is the base for his thinking.

The Free Software results are used for private interests. They are not 
interested to extend the space for activity over the software space. And 
they are not interested to analyse, what is the most powerfull way for 
technical development.

We know it from the beginning. Software in general was an open space. 
And in this time in the USA, all developed software with support from 
public fonds have to be Open Source software.

Therefore, like Matthias wrote, it is very easy to understand. We see in 
Muenchen how the moneyflow from Microsoft change the situation and start 
a big campaign of lies. This to place the responsibility for public 
space under private interests.

We have to extend this discussion to the FSFla in spanish.

many greetings, willi
Asuncion, Paraguay

Am 26/8/2017 um 13:00 schrieb hellekin:
> On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 06:30:12 +0200
> Moritz Bartl <moritz at headstrong.de> wrote:
> 
>> choices. For instance, a small country might want to take advantage of
>> further improvements by others to its software and would be more
>> inclined to fund open source projects with licenses that limit
>> commercial utilization, such as the General Public License.
>>
> 
> This argument needs to be killed once and for all. As long as it is
> used by the enemies of freedom, it will be believed and taken into
> account as a problem by institutions.
> 
> I don't know of a really good answer already formulated to dispel this
> fallacy though, do you?
> 
> I would look at reformulating "commercial utilization" as what it is:
> vendor-locking and anti-competitive behavior. The GPL limits
> vendor-locking, and favors competition by providing an even playground
> for all industrial actors regardless of their size and capacity to
> produce code; considering public code as infrastructure, like language.
> Nobody would argue that limiting access to language is a genuine
> business practice (although promoters of 'intellectual property' would
> certainly disagree.)
> 
> ==
> hk
> 

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: Re: Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign
Datum: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 19:59:02 +0200
Von: hellekin <how at gnu.org>
An: discussion at lists.fsfe.org

 > * Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]:
 >
 > [...]

Hi Erik, Mathias, all,

I've been working on a philosophical argument that distinguishes free
technologies from proprietary technologies on a technical basis.  This
offers a foundation to argue, along with the PMPC campaign, that
European institutions, and more generally public institutions, should
prefer open technical systems to closed technical systems
(respectively: free software to privative software) not for ideological
reasons, but on technical grounds. Petites Singularités already
successfully used that argument to expel a proprietary software company
from an European consortium to the benefit of a free software project
(ongoing MURIQUI project, see [0]).

A first approach of this argument can be found in "Good bye
'open-source'; hello 'free software'" from January 2013, and was
discussed abundantly during the last Libre Software Meeting in
Saint-Etienne, France, the first week of July (RMLL 2017).  I'm
preparing a report on this covering interventions of Coline Ferrarato,
Stéphane Couture, Thiago Novaes, Natacha Roussel, and Yann
Moulier-Boutang. The conversation will continue in the form of articles
and hopefully a review on free technologies.

I would like to propose that this effort is linked to the PMPC campaign
so that when the EU software project coverage is complete, the campaign
can evolve and push the technical argument. In a nutshell, French
philosopher Gilbert Simondon distinguished open and closed
technical systems that promote different ethics and aesthetics: the
former embrace diversity, evolution, perennity, and cooperation, while
the latter push univocity, control (vendor-lock), specialization. The
key argument is that the path taken to produce a technology conditions
the resulting technique.

This conversation will happen on the Petites Singularités discourse
platform [2], and I would like to invite people interested in the PMPC
to experiment with this platform as a campaign tool. I wish the FSFE
would provide support towards this endeavor: I can provide the platform
and sysadmin effort to sustain it (i.e. no FSFE sysadmin will be
required), but I can't otherwise spend more time organizing the
campaigning effort.

What do you think?  How can these two approaches (philosophical /
technical argument and EU assets identification with FOIA requests) can
create synergies to amplify the PMPC campaign?  Who would be interested
in supporting such an endeavor, and with which means?

Thank you for your attention,

==
hk

[0]:
https://ps.zoethical.com/t/singular-technologies-the-third-technoscape/333
[1]:
https://ps.zoethical.com/t/good-bye-open-source-hello-free-software/344
[2]: https://ps.zoethical.com/

-- 
hellekin <how at gnu.org>

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign
Datum: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 11:13:57 +0000
Von: Matthias Kirschner <mk at fsfe.org>
An: discussion at lists.fsfe.org

Hello everybody,

I just realised that this message was not yet sent here, also it might
be interesting for you. The more people help us with that task the
better the results will be. Thanks already for your help!

Best Regards,
Matthias

* Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]:

[...]

we are preparing a campaign named "Public Money Public Code". The aim of 
this campaign is to ask all the public authorities in Europe that 
develop software inhouse or that pay external software development and 
finance or co-finance the development with public funds, to release the 
software under a Free Software licence.

Along with the other PR-instruments we in particular like to underfed 
the campaign with data and knowledge about the use / misuse of public 
fundings for software development. We like to shed light on the best and 
the worst cases.

In order to do so, we need to collect information first. We will then 
use this information for analysis and publications to highlight the 
importance about publicly financed software to be published as Free 
Software.

And this is where you come in: We will use Freedom of Information 
requests to collect information about the status of non-free software 
used and released by public authorities in local, state and European 
level. If you do not know what a Freedom of Information request (FOI) is 
or how to file it, please find more information about it on the 
campaigns wiki page.

	https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/PMPC

If you are interested in getting active for Free Software and to help 
the FSFE to get this important campaign big, please read this wiki page 
carefully. It should give you all information necessary. If it misses 
something or something is unclear, please ask.

On the page you will find:
  - general information about the campaign
  - general information about FOIs
  - written drafts for FOIs to use
  - helpful links for FOIs in specific European countries
  - Country information pages to collect succesfully filed FOIs to be 
analysed

= How you can contribute =

  - File in FOIs and document them in the wiki accordingly
  - help the readers of your country page to understand the campaign in 
your language and give them orientation to get active -> this way the 
campaign can spread much better
  - help to translate the drafts for FOIs in your language and enable 
people to easily participate
  - spread this campaign, the idea and how people can contribute in your 
local group, in your channels, on mailing lists and wherever you see it fits

In know it is summer and you might have already your vacation planned. 
But on the other hand, maybe you have some spare time in your vacation 
to contribute for Free Software. Or you meet a lot of people during 
summer events to let them know about the campaign and they again find 
some time to contribute. Or you wait for autumn to get active : )

Really, there are so many ways to get active in this campaign and every 
bit counts. Aside from the effects for the furthering of Free Software, 
IMHO the sexyness of this campaign is that people immediately understand 
the request even if they do not care about software: that public money 
should lead into a public good is an easy and understandable request.

Happy hacking, Erik