a subversive act of playful cleverness

Sat, 15 Oct 2005

As I've received emails from Pamela (PJ) from groklaw and also Richard wanted to know more about the subject, I've decided to write a bit about this, since most people seems to be a bit confused on the matter. So this post goes for the foreigners, as you probably notice by the language, I expect to clarify and to be helpful.

First some background. In December 2001, Congressman Edgar Villanueva, from the response to Microsoft fame, presented a bill (1609) which proposed the mandatory use of free software in the public administration. It was mainly based on GRULIC's and then ViaLibre's Dragan proposal. One year after, there was a amendment to the initial bill, and also there were other proposed bills (2344, 3030 and 7389) by other congressmen, one of them had Villanueva together with other congressman as authors. Then the international community headed its attention to Peru, as it was one of the first proposals in the world at the time, but mainly due famous response to Microsoft which was, again, a collaborative work, as free software itself is, of prominent members of free software community in Latin America.

For the next years, and as the Peruvian congress works, the bill was discussed and voted on congress' committees. At one point, around 2003, there was an incident when the second congressmen that was co-author of 2485 retracted his words and dropped his support. That was quite a shock for us free software supporters and it led to have the bill archived until next legislative year.

In the meantime Villanueva was working behind the scenes to get support from other congressmen and he did good, he got support for around 40, and they signed a new proposal (8251) which didn't mandate but prefer the use of free software. Then they all were sent again to the committees and they were "tied" as one since, at the end, they had the same objective/purpose. So, in 2004 and 2005 this "grouped bill" passed the different committees that it needed to get the bill voted by all the congressmen; which happened on September 22, 2005. But this grouped bill got another name, as is a "new" bill, and it also got a new text which is what was voted and finally approved by the congress.

So, the first thing to notice is that this is not a free software law by any mean. I'd like to make this clear to avoid confusion, this law is basically a mandate for the public administration to equally treat vendors and dictates a regulation for the choose of software and its the acquisition, also for hardware which shouldn't be operating system-specific. It also mandates to the IT officers of each agency to do a strict evaluation, both in technical as in economic aspects, and that they will have to publish it on their websites and report why they have choose ceratain kind of software. The law mandates that this analysis should also take in count the current policies for cost reduction, savings of public resources and technological neutrality.

What is particularly special for us free software supporters is the fact that, besides it notes and remarks free software as an alternative for the government, -and this is important since there's people who still thinks that is such a toy software and not taken seriously-, it also states free software in a law (even people use to say that we do have laws for anything but nobody follows them) and specify what it is, that is the already known 4 freedoms.
It also mandates the neutral training of employees with regards to technology by being vendor-neutral when teaching software. So they shouldn't teach products but concepts.

But, in the other hand one can argue its a "weak law" and proprietary software can always win if we only talk on price and technology aspects, but, by this being true, we should remember the initial remark: it's not a free software law. Even it has free software background and some important remark on its preference.
So, to finish this, this law, if published by the president (25 days after congress approval -that is the begin of next week-), will need to have a regulation and we expect this to be more specific and clarify the aspects of "neutrality" so we don't end-up with yet-another non-followed law by having people argue that certain (proprietary) product was the better option (due any reason, even marketing ads) and that's why they are using it, as some proprietary vendors are arguing. APESOL has been working closer on the matter and we expect to have good news.

IMHO I think this is a good initiative and opens the door for things like promoting the mandate of open formats and makes an "official government approval" of free software, so probably at the end we will have more adoption that no other law would be needed. Currently there are many government agencies that are already using or evaluating free software, the army is one of them and they are seriously moving in that way, due economic reasons (i.e. licenses costs) but basically due national security concerns, which is a good thing to hear!.

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