ArticlesFree
Software, Free Society 2004
Chris
Bailey, Internet Rights Bulgaria. At
the moment, only 8% of the Brazilian population have access to computers
and the Internet. The majority of software being used there is pirate
software. The Brazilian government is being strongly pressed to
end software piracy in the country. How can it do this while at
the same time raising the level of computer access for the very
poor population that could not possibly afford to pay the full price
of commercial software? At a fringe meeting of 250 people at the
recent World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva
a spokesperson for the Brazilian government gave their solution
- Free Software. The
meeting, entitled "Free Software, Free Society", expressed
its disgust at the exclusion of any debate on use of Free Software
in the official proceedings of the WSIS despite the best efforts
of the Brazilians and others to put it on the agenda. Richard Stallman,
Founder of the Free Software Foundation, was cut short after
just 2 minutes in an attempt to get Free Software discussed at an
official WSIS roundtable on "Creating Digital Opportunities".
Speakers at the Free Software meeting were angry at what they saw
as WSIS bowing to the corporate interests of the commercial software
manufacturers. As the Brazilian representative said, "We know
who our enemies are. They are the people who want to take billions
of dollars from us." Another
Brazilian from Sao Paulo described the work being done there to
build digital inclusion for a population that has more than 20%
unemployment. 120 "telecenters" have been set up using
Free Software. When the centres were first started two and a half
years ago research showed that three million people in the city
did not have access to computers. Now, about 250,000 people are
using the computers at the centres. Using Free Software has enormously
reduced costs for the project. There has been no need to pay for
licences and the excellent server abilities of free software have
allowed use of a simpler computer version by networking several
client computers without hard disks to one server. According
to Beatriz Tibiriçá, Coordinator of Brazil's "Electronic
Government" project, the telecenter initiative has also destroyed
a prevalent myth about Free Software. In a recent interview she
insisted "The perception that GNU/Linux is extremely complicated
to understand and use turned out to be unfounded at the telecenters.
Children, the elderly and individuals with minimal education have
easily learned to use the systems". The
Brazilian situation is typical of many developing countries and
the solutions being developed there for using Free Software to build
digital inclusion for its population clearly have great relevance
elsewhere. But, as Pierre Ouedraogo, representing French speakers
from the African Association of Free Software Users, explained to
the Geneva Free Software meeting, there is another good reason why
people in the developing countries should support Free Software
- the need for creating "digital diversity". "If
we leave the market to make choices for us it will choose to exclude
many of us", he said, explaining how Free Software enthusiasts
were cooperating together to translate programs into a wide range
of languages and develop the use of minority character sets. This
Free Software concept of development through cooperation rather
than competition was elaborated further by Professor Lawrence Lessig
at the meeting. He paid strong tribute to Richard Stallman's actions
in founding the Free Software movement twenty years ago and described
how he and others were now trying to carry the same concept forward
into other areas besides software development by starting the CreativeCommons
project (www.creativecommons.org).
Lessig, a prominent US lawyer on copyright issues, insisted "All
forms of creativity are always about adding to what others have
done before" and described present copyright restrictions as
being contrary to the original purpose of copyright and now representing
a major restriction on a free society. Using
Free Software It
is this spirit of cooperation represented by the Free Software movement
that takes some getting used to for many people. We have become
so used to living in a competitive world that it has become difficult
to imagine people sharing programming code and cooperating together
in the way that Free Software is produced. But as a recent Free
Software publication advocating its use in schools maintained "It
is indeed a strange world when educators need to be convinced that
sharing information, as opposed to concealing information, is a
good thing." Using
Free Software is not like buying a finished commercial product.
It is more like joining a worldwide cooperative movement that shares
information and works together to solve problems. There are some
excellent introductions to migrating from using commercial software
to Free Software such as the Linux Newbie Administrator Guide (http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk)
or the incredibly comprehensive 148 page Open
Source Migration Guidelines recently produced by the European
Commission. The latter even includes a spreadsheet analysis you
can fill in to see how much money you will save by changing to Free
Software! But you will inevitably have problems in the changeover
and its actually here that the strength of Free Software really
emerges. No phoning expensive or time limited help lines is necessary;
just make sure you have contact with your local GNU/Linux user group
and are subscribed to suitable Linux support email lists. There
are actually masses of Free Software enthusiasts out there just
dying to help solve your problems! When Internet Rights Bulgaria
had problems installing Linux on one of its laptops our Manager
was quickly invited to meet someone together with the laptop at
a bus stop in town and the problem was sorted out in minutes working
on a bench by the bus stop! On other occasions problems were solved
by allowing Linux experts to take over control of our computer via
the Internet (you can do that with Linux). The
word "Free" in Free Software is actually meant in the
sense it is used in "free speech" rather than in the sense
of "free beer". But for the most part the software is
free in the second sense too. More technical assistance is needed
by most people to get the software up and running than is needed
for commercial packages, but, as just described, this support is
widely available on a voluntary basis. So is this free too? It shouldn't
be! What makes the Free Software concept work is that people contribute
to its development in return for the support they get. You certainly
do not have to be a technical expert to do this: everybody can play
an active role. Your contribution could be just submitting a bug
report, telling the author how you think his or her software could
be improved, or even just encouraging them with a pat on the back
for their hard work by telling them how much you like the software!
Non-technical users are always needed for producing easy to understand
user manuals and translators for the software interfaces are much
in demand, particularly for minority languages. Most Free Software
programs use the GNU 'gettext' tools for internationalisation. This
means all the text strings in a program are grouped together in
a catalogue module that is loaded at run time. The program can be
converted to any language by translating this catalogue.
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