Krishnakant Mane wrote:
On Wednesday 10 February 2010 06:00 PM, Dipendra Manocha wrote:Dear friends, sorry for a delayed response on an important issue ... For a visually impaired person, a screen reader is the basic requirement to access and participate in the 'information society'/digital society. Such a basic need has to be seen as an 'entitlement' or a right which society needs to provide for, just as society provides for education for all (free and compulsory education is now a law in India), and not as a charity or result of someones benevolence. When something becomes an entitlement, it also means that society (including, though not exclusively, through its main 'development agency', the Government) has to make provision to fulfill the entitlement. Just as public schools are setup/funded to ensure that all children can indeed exercise their right to education, 'public software' needs to be created and maintained, to ensure that visually impaired can access computers/internet. Public Software thus means that government has a special responsibility in its provisioning - it could of course pay technology enterprises to develop it or develop it in-house. Of course by its very definition, public software needs to be freely shareable (this freedom is essential for universal access) and open to customization / participation by citizens as developers, designers, testers, users etc (since citizen/community participation is an essential component of democracy). The four FOSS freedoms are thus conceptually inherent in public software. Public Software can thus be seen as a concept to extend FOSS, (at least that part of FOSS that is seen as essential to society), and make it a public (especially Governmental) responsibility. This can help us get out of the situation where we need to request Oracle (a private for profit company) to support Orca development and get into business model debates. Anything that is a basic entitlement has to be based on more 'funded' models (where public funding takes care of the costs and profit margins) and not purely on revenue models (where the producer expects to recover costs/make profit through individual sales), for it to be universally accessible. Operating systems and basic editors of text, numbers, images, audio-visual documents etc also need to be seen as public software, that need to be universally accesible. This way, the government is not allowed to get away by endorsing proprietary software such as JAWS in its policy documents; developing and making public software like Orca universally accessible is its own responsibility. FOSS communities of course need to also have an important role in this development and provisioning and people who are not technically skilled to develop software also have important roles in the software development/maintenance processes as users, designers, testers etc. Recently UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community, ITfC and couple of departments within Government of Karnataka organized a workshop on “Software Principles for the Public Sector, with focus on Public Education” recently in Bangalore, which discussed this concept and implications. Many FOSSCOMM members also participated. The workshop report (as also the concept note, other resources such as case studies, presentations, synopses etc etc) are available on www.Public-Software.in website. We also had a 'Public Software for the Social Sector' workshop in Jaipur on 25th, that Digantar, Digital Empowerment Foundation, UNESCO/ICTD Solution Exchange community, Knowledge Commons and ITfC organized. Look forward to comments on this concept and if we could use its logic in our current issue on Orca. regards, Guru |
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