Jan and Jerome,
- Point taken. I also got some pieces of wisdom from emails of Richard Stallman and Paolo Falcone. Thanks.
- Currently, HB 5769's section 8 is written as follows:
SECTION 8. Right to Derivatives and the Control and Modification of Software – Government shall obtain full rights and control over derivatives, modifications and customizations done by government on software that it uses and adopts, provided that government does not use said modified software nor its derivatives for commercial purposes.
- Code written and modified by government which will be released for public should be open source. Hence, we will rephrase section 8 to read as follows:
SECTION 8. Right to Derivatives and the Control and Modification of Software – Government shall obtain rights and control over derivatives, modifications and customizations done by government on non-FOSS that it uses and adopts, provided that government does not use said modified software nor its derivatives for commercial purposes.
- we can then add a new provision which may not necessarily follow the exact letter as I wrote here but in spirit shall be the same as:
SECTION <N>. Open Standards Government Communications – All government communications, transactions and infrastructure for ICT goods and services primarily created for the same, shall be done in format or specifications that adheres to open standards (FYI: as defined in the bill, open standards are "free/non-RAND open standards) and protocols.
SECTION <O>. Adoption of FOSS policy in Government Research and Development – All government programs must adhere to open standards and must execute, run or compile in FOSS platforms. All software developed by government must be FOSS except in exigent circumstances where national security may be in peril, or in such other cases where the right to freedom to public information are reasonably controlled as provided for by law.
In case of exigent circumstances, government shall release as FOSS or for public consumption said software, system and ICT goods and services when it is to be retired or replaced.
-As a rejoinder, please understand that the bill was already filed. However, we are really planning to introduce some amendments during deliberations and the Technical Working Group discussions on the bill. Maybe an officer or two of PLUG and Free Software Alliance can join in on discussions in Congress as resource persons? Kaloi will make the necessary arrangements for that.
i hope it gets amended :) and free of any loopholes so no wiseass in the government could circumvent :D
__________________
jeff,
i hope you can modify section 8 of the proposed bill or omit it, it's totally against FOSS paradigm.
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