"The Free
Software Challenge
In Latin America"
By David Sugar
03 June, 2005
Countercurrents.org
In
2002, then-U.S. ambassador to Peru, John Hilton, delivered a threatening
letter to the Peruvian congress using his public office to act on behalf
of a very powerful American private interest. The letter, which was
leaked to the press, stated that Microsoft Corporation and its chairman
Bill Gates dissaproved of Peru debating a proposed law, Special Bill
1609, which favored the use of free software in public administration.
Hilton warned its passage would harm U.S.-Peru relations.
This incident was
an early salvo in a brewing international conflict. As nations of the
world increasingly turn to free software to cut costs and promote local
development, some powerful North American commercial interests have
responded by bullying. Sometimes they have done so by proxy, such using
public servants like Ambassador Hilton. Sometimes they have threatening
legal action to intimidate outspoken critics such as Brasil's National
Institute of Information and Technology (ITI) president Sergo Amadeu
who compared Microsoft business practices to that of drug dealers. Sometimes,
they have threatend governments directly, such as last November, when
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threatened to sue Asian governments who
choose to use free software.
Part of what distinguishes
free software (sometimes called open source or libre software) commercially
from proprietary software is a matter of licensing. While all software
is protected under copyright, commercial proprietary software is often
licensed under terms that create additional restrictions, such as limiting
where one can use such software and who may be allowed to use it. Often
proprietary commercial software includes licenses to explicitly deny
users the right or ability to modify software to fit their needs or
access their own data, the right to speak about the functionality of
the software they purchased, or to resell it to others when they no
longer wish to use it. In contrast, free software expressly asserts
and grants these fundamental rights through licensing, and does so in
a way that enables others to fully reclaim these rights such as by providing
source code.
While both free
and proprietary commercial software have co-existed uneasily for a long
time in many parts of the world, I believe what has made certain private
North American commercial interests respond directly in Latin America
is that many nations there have chosen to promote the use of free software
specifically in public administration. There already is a long history
for the support and use of such software in Brasil by the Workers party,
starting from the days when they controlled the state government of
Rio Grande Du Sul and instituted private/public sector partnerships
through projects such as procergs. Most recently the government of President
Luiz Lula Da Silva has chosen to use free software solutions built around
GNU/Linux exclusively in a project to make computers available to the
poor, as recommended by MIT this past March.
Free software in
public administration is not just about software for special government
programs such as digital inclusion for the poor. This is a battle about
the purchase and use of all software by national governments and the
terms such software will be provided under. This about the procurement
of servers and database applications used to house government data.
This is also about the software that will be purchased and used on the
desktops of government office workers every day, and whether they will
continue to purchase and use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office
under the the terms of a monopoly supplier, or free software alternatives
such as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice.
As Latin American
governments increasingly use free software, suppliers will need to adapt
to provide it. Private industries which interact with government will
also be effected to remain compatible, and provide additional private
markets for those vendors. All of these create a national economic environment
that certain companies, such as Microsoft, would need to change in order
to fully participate in.
One reason that
free software is being promoted by Latin American governments is a question
of initial cost. In Brasil, they expect to save over $1 billion dollars
annually through the use of free software and elimination of license
fees. Many other Latin American governments are of course keenly aware
of the cost benefits of free software. In some countries, such as in
Peru and Argentina, they have tried passing special procurement laws
to more rapidly increase the adoption of free software in government.
In Venezuela, the use of free software in public administration is now
supported directly by President Hugo Chavez.
While it is true
that the total cost of using software is not represented in the purchase
price or license fees alone, most other factors also tend to favor free
software and better explain the potential for large cost savings through
its use. One reason is commercial free software will often work on existing
and older hardware rather than requiring new hardware to be purchased.
Another is that since proprietary commercial software publishers depend
on the number of licenses they can sell, it is often desirable to require
as many additional software sales to perform a given level of work as
possible. It should therefore come as no surprise that I often find
the same workload that can be done, for example, with a typical GNU/Linux
system may require three or four times as many proprietary servers,
which also represents additional hardware and support costs.
Free software also
can result in lower costs through the absence of monopolies. One cannot
achieve a monopoly in free software in part because there can always
be another free software publisher that can supply the same goods at
a lower cost should this occur. This is in fact one of the main reasons
for governments to prefer using free software instead of proprietary
commercial software: When money is spent on proprietary software, only
a small proportion of that money goes towards funding useful services
and software development, as a large part of it goes as a monopoly rent
to the shareholders of the proprietary software company. On the other
hand, in the world of free software, there are no such monopolies, so
money that is spent on free software is good for creating jobs and hence
offers other direct and local economic benefits. In Latin America money
that is spent on proprietary commercial software serves mainly to make
already-rich foreign software publishers even
richer.
In trying to create
a market for or to promote the use of free software, many Latin American
countries, such as in Peru, have often chosen to do so through procurement
laws, which cover how a government will purchase goods and services.
These laws typically state the terms of purchase that a government will
use. Often they are designed to prevent bribery, and to make the process
of government purchase transparent. This is often done through the use
of competitive bidding. Competitive bidding allows products created
by different manufacturers and publishers to compete on providing the
same service, and by doing so, prevents the government from being forced
to rely on a sole source supplier. Propriety commercial software, by
its very definition and through the rights it takes away from users,
is software which can only come from a single supplier.
In providing opportunities
for Latin American citizens to directly participate in the development
and worldwide commercial software market locally, free software offers
incentives for forming a local software industry that can then compete
on an equal basis with that of any other advanced country in the world.
What we often forget is that software does not require expensive plants
or high capital investment to develop. Software may only require people
who are free to use their skills and natural talents. Certainly, the
nations of Latin America can and do produce people with such talents
and skills. Free software means these people can practice these skills
for their own benefit and the benefit of their society as a whole without
having to look for work in or migrate to foreign lands. By choosing
to procure free software, the national government can directly encourage
this.
If Latin American
countries choose to create an economic environment that accepts participation
by free software, existing corporations need not be excluded. Companies
like Microsoft could choose, for example, to change the way they license
their existing products. They are also free to adapt and offer services
based on existing free software already in the marketplace. Instead
of competing in these new markets, some companies have responded by
trying to make it impossible for Latin American governments to choose
and use free software at all. These companies not only resort to bullying,
but also lobby our government to modify free trade treaties and use
international organizations to include conditions that try to make it
impossible for Latin American nations to choose alternative products
or develop local markets.
I have often seen
WIPO used in this way to promote the private commercial interests of
wealthy corporations. WIPO is often used to promote treaties and laws
which export both the North American corporate notion of pharmaceutical
and software idea patenting to developing nations. Private corporations
then using these same treaties to then enforce existing North American
patent monopolies, thereby preventing the development of competitive
local industry. Another example of market control through trade treaties
is the "IP rights chapter" of Free Trade Area of The Americas
(FTAA) treaty.
One way I have seen
Latin American countries respond to WIPO and other patent bearing treaties
has been by banding together with other developing nations around the
world to help promote a development agenda for WIPO and bring it into
harmony with the wishes of the UN general assembly. Yet powerful American
and European commercial interests have chosen to use the WIPO chair
to explicitly bar NGOs representing the interests of developing nations
from attending or participating in WIPO discussions on a development
agenda, even those organizations already duly certified and recognized
with observer status.
The people of Latin
America, of all people, surely must understand well about what corporate
bullies are. Last century many nearby Caribbean nations were routinely
invaded by marines as part of the banana wars to prop up the interest
of specific North American corporations such as United Fruit. While
last century's bullies came with tanks and guns, the bullies of this
new century come now with laws and treaties they wish Latin Americans
to adopt that undermine the heritage and the most basic rights Latin
American citizens enjoy, not for the benefit of Latin America, but once
again for the benefit of private North American corporate interests.
The right to innovate is not a privilege to be restricted to a tiny
minority, is not even a right specific or exclusive to the question
of free software alone, but is a basic and fundamental right every human
being must be free to enjoy.
Some citations and
sources...
Wired Magazine;
"Microsoft's big stick in Peru"
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54141,00.html
Can I use myself
as a primary source? :)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6244
GNU.org.pe: Peruvian
Congressman's Open Letter to Microsoft
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-05-06-012-26-OS-SM-LL
Lawrence Lessig
blog
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001983.shtml
"Use Linux
and you will be sued, Ballmer tells governments"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PROCERGS: todos
os estados deveriam ter uma
http://olinux.uol.com.br/artigos/264/print_preview.html
Lawrence Lessig
blog
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001983.shtml
"Use Linux
and you will be sued, Ballmer tells governments"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/18/ballmer_linux_lawsuits/
PROCERGS: todos
os estados deveriam ter uma
http://olinux.uol.com.br/artigos/264/print_preview.html
The use of open
source represents annual savings of US$ 1.1 billion for the Brazilian
government.
http://www.brazzil.com/2004/html/articles/apr04/p136apr04.htm
Venezuelas Public
Administration to Use Open Source Software
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1457
The WIPO Development
Agenda and Why You Should Care About It
http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/dev_agenda/
Experts: Central/South
American History
http://experts.about.com/q/673/3343542.htm
Brazil: Free Software's
Biggest and Best Friend
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
F40614FD395B0C7A8EDDAA0894DD404482
MIT official advocates
open-source on computers for poor in Brazil
http://www.computerworld.com/
softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,100494,00.html