On Friday 03 Sep 2010, Guru गुरु wrote: > A detailed note on public software, its rationale, convergence and > divergence with FOSS and its imperative is provided in this mail. A > PDF version is available on > http://public-software.in/sites/default/files/Note%20on%20public%20so > ftware%20for%20FOSSCOMM%20-%20September%202010_0.pdf
I'll not go into a detailed point-by-point discussion, enough people have already done so and will continue to do so. This is a well-written paper and deserves analysis and discussion. My take: 1. Bringing in the concept of "public good" is weakening the argument from two points of view. Firstly, as others have also pointed out, equating intangibles (software, poetry, music, fiction) with physical goods is a fundamental fallacy. You had mentioned the two criteria of rivalrousness and exclusiveness; those IMO are a much better way of showing the clear distinction that exists between tangible and intangible objects. Terming software a "good" reinforces the mindset that it should be traded like any other good, and paves the way for laws related to physical goods to be applied to it. Further, "good", just like "free", has two incompatible meanings in this context, as demonstrated by the following two statements: Software is a public good (the meaning you propose) Software for the public good (also meaningful in this context) Using "public good" or just "good" will only cause confusion, so my request is to refrain from using the term altogether. 2. Bringing another identifier -- "Public Software" -- into the game at this stage is extremely dangerous. We already have two terms that describe the software we are aiming for: "Free software" and "Open Source software". These two, between them, capture the complete gamut of properties that we desire in the software that Government, education and civil society adopt. Just like the term "copyright" remains the same, regardless of the content being copyrighted, similarly "FOSS" should remain FOSS, regardless of whether the software is in the public good or not. When someone tries to deliberately blur the distinction between FOSS and proprietary software there is ample support from the community, from corporations, from organisations dedicated to supporting one aspect of FOSS or the other. However, what happens when people deliberately start applying the term "public software" to non-free software (which our proprietary software friends will do with alacrity)? Who is going to stand up for the rights of FOSS? Don't expect any support from the OSI, FSF, FSF India, IBM, Red Hat, the international community, since they don't have a clue what "public software" is all about. We will left as a small band of guerillas fighting a losing battle all on our lonesome. To sum up, I see no way to make "public software" a commonly-accepted term; I only see it as a weapon that the proprietary software companies will be able to use to continue blurring the lines between FOSS and proprietary software, and ultimately get their agendas accepted on a wide-spread scale. If our government, educational and non-government institutions do not understand that FOSS /is/ "public software", IMO the solution is to educate them rather than to coin a new, unaccepted, untested and vulnerable phrase. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
_______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
