Re: licensing

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Taran Rampersad wrote:

> Why would you pay your government to write software that another company 
> - in another country - can profit from? I don't know how to atomize this 
> further for people to understand, but if I need to, I will try.

  The problem is that many governments are currently very liberal with 
their "corporate welfare" handouts.  In Canada we have situations where 
Canadian branches of transnational interests are able to get R&D subsidies 
and other such things very easily.

  I tried to reach the R&D policy making community with the following:
http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/ip-conundrum.html


  When I was speaking to Industry Canada bureaucrats about this in the
past I had the same concern as you.  I was told that this simply was not
the way things worked currently, and that the Government of Canada
providing subsidies to incumbent business interests was considered good
public policy.

  I fully expect that if Canada were to be making a recommendations to her
departments that it would be non-Copyleft licenses like the BSD license
that would be favored specifically because they want to provide handouts
to incumbent industries.  Promoting new beneficiaries of a transformative
economic change, the movement from "software manufacturing" to what I
believe will be proven to be a far better environment for everyone but the
incumbents, does not seem to be how things go.


Note: I am not anti-corporate or anti-business, and am a self employed
businessperson.  I believe that incumbent private sector special interests
should not be receiving handouts from governments.  Free market principles
should be deciding "software manufacturing" vs FLOSS, not handouts or
built-in biases for one methodology over the other in procurement
processes as is currently the case.

  Current government procurement (at least in Canada) pretty much assumes
"software manufacturing" methodologies.  The Software Choice initiative in
Orwellian double-speak style seeks to make that categorical preference
even stronger.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or
 electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than 
 politicians should be bought.  -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/