Bruce Perens on Microsoft 'Software Choice' - No Choice!

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

(Forwarded from C-FIT Community discussion list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 12:55:27 +0100
From: iriXx <iriXx@iriXx.org>


something rather similiar to this happened in the UK with
the gateway.gov.uk scandal.... Gateway, our online tax
service, was commissioned from Microsoft and until recently
only would run on MS machines and browsers... GNU/Linux and
Mac users were locked out for ages until protests lead to
them opening up the website... i did my last tax return
online using Konqueror, deliberately ;-)

best,
miriam

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26616.html

MS 'Software Choice' scheme a clever fraud

By Bruce Perens
Posted: 09/08/2002 at 22:09 GMT

Microsoft's new "Software Choice" campaign is all for your
right to choose...  as long as you choose Microsoft. It's
too bad that Intel and the U.S.  Government couldn't see
through the rhetoric. 

Microsoft is worried about Peruvian Congressman Edgar
Villanueva's proposal  for his nation's government agencies
to standardize on Free Software for  their own internal use.
But Villanueva makes an important point: everybody  has to
deal with the government. If a government uses proprietary
software,  its citizens will probably have to use the same
software to communicate with  it. A government web site that
only supports Internet Explorer would lock  citizens into
that Microsoft product. In contrast, a government site
using  open standards and avoiding patented software would
allow citizens to choose  between many different kinds of
software to access the site. Free Software,  also called
Open Source, is itself a kind of open standard - its source
code  is its own reference. Developers of proprietary
software can use that  reference to create interoperating
programs, without infringing on the actual  Open Source
code. Thus, when a government uses Open Source, it assures
its  citizens a choice to purchase both proprietary and Open
Source software for  communicating with their government.
The people's choice will be based on  factors like
functionality, quality, and convenience, rather than on
customer  lock-in. 

Villanueva also wants the government and people of Peru to
have a software  infrastructure that they can afford - to
pull themselves out of poverty and  bootstrap an e-commerce
economy. Free Software's low total-cost-of-ownership  is
attractive to them, and the ability for Peruvians to support
Free Software  themselves, because they have source code and
the right to redistribute it,  means economic independence.
This could provide them with the foundation for  many
e-commerce-enabled businesses based on the labor of the
Peruvian people  and the natural resources of their nation.
But there's one sort of business  that Free Software won't
facilitate in Peru - lock-in of customers to a  proprietary
software product. 

Microsoft has responded with a clever Software Choice
campaign that, read  quickly, appears to fight
discrimination and call for choice, while actually 
promoting policies that would lock out Free Software. For
example, it  promotes the embedding of royalty-bearing
software patents into "open"  standards. Of course Free
Software producers don't charge copyright royalty  fees, and
thus can't afford to pay for patent royalties, so they would
not be  able to implement any standard that contains
royalty-bearing patents. Housed  at industry organization
CompTIA, the cynical campaign is clearly driven by 
Microsoft, repeating rhetoric we've heard from them before.
It also counts  Linux-supporter Intel as a member. The U.S.
government has also bought into  the Software Choice
rhetoric, sending their ambassador to urge that Peru  reject
Villanueva's proposal. 

How was Intel taken in? They didn't have any choice. Intel
can't afford to  lose Micrsoft's support for its new
bet-the-company Itanium 64-bit processor  family. Without
Microsoft, the Itanium will become another DEC ALPHA - a 
64-bit architecture that lost much of its market after
Microsoft announced  that Windows wouldn't support it. Intel
needs more than a just a Windows port  - it needs an
excellent windows port, with Microsoft's enthusiastic
support  egging customers on to make the transition to the
new architecture.  Microsoft's price for this is for Intel
to downplay its Linux involvement and  support Microsoft's
monopolistic initiatives. 

Unlike Intel, the U.S. Government clearly did have a choice.
That government  appears to have lost much of its will to
prosecute its anti-trust case  against Microsoft since the
presidential election. Its actions in Peru  actually help to
support Microsoft's monopoly. 

The language of Software Choice is in the tradition of "soft
money" political  campaigns - it's written to oppose
something without ever really mentioning  what it opposes.
I'll analyze the principles of Software Choice, to 
illustrate how they actually mean no choice at all: 

Procure software on its merits, not through categorical
preferences. Public  entities should procure the software
that best meets their needs and should  avoid any
categorical preferences for open source software,
commercial  software, free software, or other software
development models. 

They feel that a government should not decide, 'we will only
use Free Software  for government functions,' as in the
Peruvian proposal. But shouldn't a  government, as a
software customer, have that choice? If making that choice 
will assure the people of that nation the ability to choose
between more  different software products for interfacing
with their government, both Free  Software and proprietary,
isn't it the right choice? And isn't the fact that  Free
Software can be freely used, redistributed, and modified a
"merit"? 

Promote broad availability of government funded research.
When public funds  are used to support software research and
development, the innovations that  result from this work
should be licensed in ways that take into account both  the
desirability of broadly sharing those advances as well as
the  desirability of applying those advances to
commercialized products. 

This is a swipe at government-funded participation in
software development  that is placed under the GPL , the
license that is used on the Linux kernel  and many other
Free Software projects. The research agencies of various 
governments join the community in developing Linux. In the
U.S., it's been  the subject of projects within NASA, the
Department of Energy, and even the  National Security
Agency. The GPL mandates that anyone has the right to give 
you a free copy of the Linux kernel, which makes sense to
the taxpayers who  have already paid for part of its
development. But Microsoft would like you  to pay for that
software twice: once with your taxes, and a second time
when  you buy it from Microsoft. 

However, Microsoft is also a taxpayer - although in some
years they've managed  to avoid U.S. corporate income taxes
entirely. As a taxpayer, perhaps they  should be able to
embed the result of government-funded work in their 
products and charge other taxpayers for it a second time.
But in that case,  that work should be licensed so that all
of Microsoft's competitors can make  use of it as well - and
that means without restrictive licensing terms and 
royalty-bearing software patents that would shut out Open
Source. After all,  the people who write and use Open Source
are taxpayers as well. 

Governments oppose monopolies because they are bad for the
customer. Thus, the  licensing of taxpayer-funded software
should fight embrace-and-extend, the  tactic that Microsoft
uses to gain a monopoly lock on a market through the  use of
deliberate incompatibility. That's only fair to Microsoft's 
competitors, and to all of the users who don't wish to be
locked into a  single software product - those people are
taxpayers too. But the licenses  that are best at fighting
embrace-and-extend are the very ones that Microsoft 
eschews: the GPL, the LGPL, and the Sun Industry Standards
Source License.  Microsoft calls those licenses
"intellectual-property impairing" because they  all mandate
some degree of disclosure that would allow programs from
other  vendors, including Open Source programs, to
interoperate with their products. 

Promote interoperability through platform-neutral standards.
When these  standards are open and available to all through
reasonable and  non-discriminatory licensing they help
developers to create products that can  interoperate with
each other. It is important that government policy 
recognize that open standards - which are available to any
software  developers - are not synonymous with, and do not
require, open source  software either for their adoption or
utility. 

The so-called reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing
refers to the  embedding of royalty-bearing software patents
in industry standards.  Proponents say that such royalties
are OK, as long as they are the same for  everyone, and not
too high. But Free Software producers don't collect 
copyright royalties, and thus can't afford to pay royalties
to patent  holders. They would be locked out of implementing
these standards. The  Software Choice folks also attempt to
assert that it's not important for a  standard to accomodate
Open Source at all. 

Maintain a choice of strong intellectual property
protections. 

I don't disagree with this principle, as long as the
proponents of strong  intellctual property protections don't
attempt to block those who prefer  weaker protections on
their own software from interoperating with the rest of  the
world's software. But this is just what they are doing -
through the use  of restrictive software patents,
proprietary file and intercommunications  formats, and
through digital rights management systems that block Free 
Software from playing video disks that its users have
legitimately purchased.  Their use of intellectual property
protections should be only to prevent  their own products
from being unlawfully duplicated and resold, not to  prevent
others from creating or using their own software and
interoperating  with other software in a free market. 

The Free Software community has been criticized for being
good at opposing  programs like Software Choice, but not as
good at producing its own platforms  to promote. Thus, I've
tried to put together a Sincere Choice platform - it 
replaces the cynical Software Choice with a more positive
set of principles  that really would assure the software
user of a broad choice between  interoperable products, both
Open Source and proprietary. The principles of  Sincere
Choice are: 

Open Standards 

Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards
that are sincerely  open for all to implement, without
royalty fees or discrimination. 

Choice Through Interoperability 

No user should be required to use a particular product
simply because other  users do. Competing products should
interoperate with each other through open  standards. 

Competition by Merit 

Software vendors should compete fairly on the merit of their
products, rather  than by attempting to lock each other's
products out of the market. Besides  functionality, merits
include the copyright and patent policies attached to a 
product, and the disclosure of file formats and
communication protocols so  that other software may
interoperate. 

Research Availability 

The people pay for government-funded research, its fruits
should be available  to all of them equally. We promote Open
Source / Free Software licensing of  taxpayer-funded
software and data as a means of distributing research
results  fairly. 

Range of Copyright Policies 

We include the supporters of a broad range of different
copyright policies,  from Public Domain through Open Source
and Free Software to Proprietary. We  support use of the GPL
and LGPL licenses when appropriate. We assert that  Open
Source and Proprietary models can be used together
effectively. 

Freedom to Set Policy 

Individual users, businesses, and government should all be
free to set their  own policies regarding what sorts of
software they will acquire and use. They  should not force a
particular software paradigm or product choice upon  others. 

I've put together a web site for this fledgeling platform:
SincereChoice.org. 

Imagine a truly open market for computer software: one in
which there were  many interoperating products, truly
competing on their merits rather than  upon their vendor's
ability to lock other products out of the market. Prices 
would be lower, quality higher, and we'd have a transition
to a  customer-centric view of the software business, away
from the vendor-centric  view that many of us, perhaps
unconsciously, hold today. Or we could continue  today's
anti-competitive policies. Which one is your choice? 

Bruce Perens is a Free Software evangelist best known for
creating the Open  Source Definition, the manifesto of Open
Source. 

-- 
iriXx
www.iriXx.org

copyleft: creativity, technology and freedom?
info@copyleftmedia.org.uk
www.copyleftmedia.org.uk

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