[FSF India] [ARTICLE] NGOs and Free Software

[Raj Singh]

Development, Ethical Trading, and Free Software

Danny Yee

Last modified November 21, 1999

Abstract

This paper makes the political and ethical case for the adoption of free
software by Community Aid Abroad and other members of Oxfam International.
It should be applicable to development agencies generally and to other
organisations with similar values.

Free software has obvious pragmatic advantages for community development
processes, most notably in its empowerment of users. But the ideological
foundations and social structure of the free software movement are also
consistent with community development at a theoretical level.

Feedback on this document would be appreciated: additional case studies
would be particularly useful. A Community Aid Abroad appropriate
information technology group has been set up, including a mailing list for
discussions in this area.

Contents

* Introduction
* Software: Drawbacks and Dangers
* The Advantages of Free Software
* Free Software in Action
* Conclusion and Recommendations

Introduction

Informational goods make up a sizeable and increasing fraction of the
world's trade - and an even larger fraction of profits, since margins tend
to be higher (Compare Microsoft's profit/turnover ratio with General
Electrics'). This trend towards an "information economy" is continuing.
Ethical trading and appropriate technology policies should therefore cover
informational products.

With some goods the major ethical concerns are in their manufacture or the
effects on the environment of their use. Examples are wheat, iron,
refrigerators, and so forth. Such goods are covered by a draft Oxfam GB
Ethical Purchasing Policy, which advocates products that "are produced and
delivered under conditions that do not involve the abuse or exploitation
of any persons" and "have the least negative impact on the environment".

The policy mentioned considers weapons and baby milk powder as special
cases. But there are many products other than weapons and baby milk powder
whose production and delivery may raise no or only minor environmental and
ethical concerns, but which may still have effects of major concern in the
way they affect the autonomy and independence of users. It is the
contention of this paper that software falls into this category.

This paper addresses only computer software. Other intellectual property
issues are also of great importance. Control of genetic variability
through gene patents is one example; World Intellectual Property
Organisation treaties on copyright are another. (The latter ought to
receive the same sort of critical response that the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment did.)

This is the context for intellectual property rights enforcement. This
world market in knowledge is a major and profoundly anti-democratic new
stage of capitalist development. The transformation of knowledge into
property necessarily implies secrecy: common knowledge is no longer
private. In this new and chilling stage, communication itself violates
property rights. The WTO is transforming what was previously a universal
resource of the human race - its collectively, historically and
freely-developed knowledge of itself and nature - into a private and
marketable force of production. (Allan Freeman, Fixing up the world? GATT
and the World Trade Organisation)

A good deal of the world's primary resources are located in the poorer
countries of the world's "South", even if their exploitation is often in
the hands of external corporations. Systems for controlling the
distribution of information, on the other hand, are (like possession of
capital) overwhelmingly centralised in the rich "North". This should be of
great concern to organisations such as Oxfam International members which
take a long-term perspective in their attempts to reduce the inequitable
distribution of resources. As the United Nations Sustainable Development
Networking Program says:

Information and Communication Technologies are now fundamental to dealing
with all development issues in developing countries.

An Oxfam International Education Now report presents some of the
consequences of an information economy for educational equity.

_________________________________________________________________

Software: Drawbacks and Dangers

The following analysis of potential political and ethical dangers in
software is not meant to be complete. Nor is it an analysis which applies
equally to all kinds of software. There are certain key components, such
as operating systems, application programming interfaces, and software
with mass deployment, on which many implementations and many other
software systems depend. These are more critical than software systems
with peripheral roles.

The Expense

Software is often prohibitively expensive. The standard price for an
ordinary office package might be a year's income for most of the world's
people. As one Mexican project adopting free software wrote:

The primary reason for reaching this decision was the kind of money we
would have had to pay if we went for proprietary software: at US$55 for
each machine with Win98 and Office, US$500 for every NT license and an
average of 6 workstations and one server for 140000 labs, that's a lot of
money.

Though "discounts" are often available on software, these tend to either
be in exchange for accepting a local monopoly for the vendor's products,
or an attempt to gain market share at the expense of competitors.
Consider, for example, Microsoft's attempts to bribe universities and
colleges into using NT.

So called software "piracy" is obviously an option for those unable or
unwilling to purchase software, and indeed it is a common choice
throughout the South, where copyright law is often poorly enforced. But
this places users at the mercy of the law, increasing their vulnerability
to those rich and powerful enough to use it to their own advantage. Also,
development organisations themselves are vulnerable to enforcement in
their home countries, so they can not support or encourage such practices.

As well as the up-front costs of software, there are usually hidden costs.
Often licensing is per-user, so costs will increase with the size of the
user base and inhibit growth. Support for proprietary software is almost
always prohibitively expensive. Frequent software upgrades may be required
to maintain compatibility and functionality (consider the deliberate
modification by Microsoft of the file format in successive versions of
Word, in order to force users to upgrade to newer versions). And software
tends, especially with upgrades, to require more powerful, and hence more
expensive, hardware. These hidden costs are often recurrent.

Lack of Openness

Open standards and protocols are in the interests of consumers, and indeed
of most businesses: they allow genuine market competition, giving users
options and choices. Closed standards and protocols and technical secrets,
on the contrary, benefit only those seeking to maintain or attain monopoly
control of markets by decommoditizing software. (Proprietary software can,
of course, use open standards and protocols, but much of it doesn't.)

Security and Privacy

The use of black-box proprietary software without source code creates
security risks, since it makes the detection of Trojan horses rather
difficult. One high-profile case is the Melissa Virus. An extreme case is
government surveillance: an Australian government report (the Walsh
Report, see sections 6.2.10 and 6.2.11) has recommended that security
agencies arrange for back doors to be inserted into mass-market commercial
software to allow eavesdropping. Perhaps it is paranoia to think that the
United States National Security Agency has already arranged for this to be
done, but when peoples' lives are at stake, can one really trust (say)
Microsoft Word when vulnerable West Papuan or East Timorese activists are
involved?

From a privacy point of view, some worrying features are known to have
been built into popular proprietary software packages. Microsoft Windows
and recent versions of Office include a unique computer identifier in all
documents - an identifier which is sent to Microsoft on registration of
software, as well as in cookies set by Microsoft's web site. The
implications of this for anyone trying to maintain anonymous -
whistle-blowers and activists most obviously - are frightening. (See
analysis and a news report from CNET; Paul Ferris points the obvious
argument for free software in "Of Corporations, Privacy, and Open Source
Software".)

The Creation of New Dependencies

Proprietary software increases the dependence of individuals,
organisations, and communities on external forces - typically large
corporations with a very poor track record on acting in the public
interest. There are dependencies for support, installation and problem
fixing, sometimes in critical systems. There are dependencies for upgrades
and compatibility. There are dependencies when modification or extended
functionality is required. And there are ongoing financial dependencies if
licensing is recurrent.

Political dependencies can result from the use of proprietary software,
too. For example, an Irish ISP under attack for hosting the top level East
Timor domain .tp was helped out by hackers and community activists
(setting up a secure Linux installation). Given that this attack was
probably carried out with the connivance of elements of the Indonesian
government, it is hard to see a commercial vendor with a significant
market presence in Indonesia being so forthcoming with support.

Nearly exact parallels to this exist in agriculture, where the patenting
of seed varieties and genome sequences and the creation of non-seeding
varieties are used to impose long-term dependencies on farmers.

An Analogy: Baby-milk Powder

The effects of baby-milk powder on poor infants (which has sparked a
Nestle campaign/boycott) provide an analogy to the effects of proprietary
software.

Sending information in Microsoft Word format to correspondents in Eritrea
is analagous to Nestle advertising baby milk powder to Indian mothers. It
encourages the recipients to go down a path which is not in their best
interests, and from which it is not easy for them to recover. The apparent
benefits (the doctor recommended it; we will be able to read the documents
sent to us) may be considerable and the initial costs involved (to stop
breast-feeding and switch to milk powder; to start using Microsoft Office)
may be subsidised, hidden, or zero (with "piracy"), but the long-term
effects are to make the recipients dependent on expensive recurrent
inputs, and to burden them with ultimately very high costs.

Moreover, because documents can be easily copied and because there are
strong pressures to conform to group/majority standards in document
formats, pushing individuals towards proprietary software and document
formats can snowball to affect entire communities, not just the
individuals initially involved.

Restrictions on Self-help

Proprietary software not only creates new dependencies: it actively
hinders self-help, mutual aid, and community development.

* Users cannot freely share software with others in the community, or with
other communities.

* The possibilities for building local support and maintainance systems
are limited.

* Modification of software to fit local needs is not possible, leaving
communities with software designed to meet the needs of wealthy Northern
users and companies, which may not be appropriate for them.

An Example: Language Support

Language support provides a good example of the advantages of free
software in allowing people to adapt products to their own ends and take
control of their lives. Operating systems and word processing software
support only a limited range of languages. Iceland, in order to help
preserve its language, wants Icelandic support added to Microsoft Windows
- and is even willing to pay for it. But without access to the source code
- and the right to modify it - they are totally dependent on Microsoft's
cooperation. (See an article in the Seattle Times and an article by Martin
Vermeer which argues that lack of software localisation is a threat to
cultural diversity.)

Whatever the outcome of this particular case, it must be noted that
Iceland is hardly a poor or uninfluential nation. There is absolutely no
hope of Windows being modified to support Aymara or Lardil or other
indigenous languages: the spread of such proprietary software will
continue to contribute to their marginalisation.

In contrast, the source code to the GNU/Linux operating system is
available and can be freely modified, so groups are able to add support
for their languages. See, as an example, the KDE Internationalization Page
(KDE is a desktop for GNU/Linux) or a project to localise GNU/Linux for
Indian languages. Another example of the kind of thing that access to
source code allows is the Omega Typesetting System, a modification of the
free TeX typesetting system "designed for printing all of the world's
languages, modern or ancient, common or rare"; this sort of extension or
modification is simply not possible with proprietary word-processing
packages.

Unsustainable

Sustainable development should favour unlimited resources over finite
ones. But while software appears to be a renewable resource, its control
by profit-making corporations, as Intellectual Property, effectively turns
it into a finite resource.

_________________________________________________________________

The Advantages of Free Software

What is Free Software?

The Free Software Foundation's "What is Free Software?" provides a good
introduction to free software.

`Free software'' refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute,
study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to three
levels of freedom:

* The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.

* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can share with your neighbor.

* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the
public, so that the whole community benefits.

A key point is that "free" refers to liberty, not price. Software is only
"free" if users have the freedom to copy, modify, and distribute it, and
to share it with others. A key necessity for this is access to the source
code.

Prominent examples of free software are the Linux kernel and the GNU
system environment, which together constitute a complete operating system
(an alternative to Windows or MacOS), and the Apache web server and
sendmail mail transport agent, which between them provide more than 50% of
the Internet's web sites and handle perhaps 80% of the world's email.

Pragmatic Advantages

Quite independently of any ethical and political considerations, there are
also pragmatic and technical arguments for the deployment of free software
systems.

* Some free software products are widely recognised as more reliable and
robust, more powerful, and more secure than their proprietary
counterparts, and a plausible argument can be made that this is not just
accidental, but a consequence of their open development, implementation,
and testing.

Rob Bos puts it well in 32bitsonline

Free software is better than non-free software. It works better, it works
faster, it works longer. Open source programs are tried and proven, they
are constantly pressed from every direction to do specific tasks, and do
them well; and for the simple reason that they are written to work, not
simply to sell copies. Free software doesn't just work better, it works
orders of magnitude better. Open sourcing an application gives the source
code to a large number of developers, instead of a small, tight group.
Free software projects have a pool of developers and an effective budget
multiple times higher than an equivalent proprietary development project,
and will, given all other equal things, advance at a rate many times
faster because of their access to an much larger development team. Peer
review of code isn't just a pipe dream, it is an essential means to
writing superior applications, no matter where they are written.

* Free software can typically be obtained for the cost of the media
(typically a few dollars for a CD) or network traffic (for distribution
via computer networks). It can always be freely distributed. The pragmatic
benefits of this should be obvious, but in some contexts the price of free
software can also take on political significance:

I live in India, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a large
number of awfully bright, poor people. In India, today, the entry-level
programmer (C knowledge but no work experience) earns $100 a month, and it
is not routine for him to have a computer at home. Entry-level computers
at $250 and below will attract millions of buyers in India, who will find
the difference between $250 and $750 to be a massive one.

Industry experts look at around 200 million existing computers, 80% of
which run Microsoft OSes. It's useful to focus on the next billion
computer sales. In this, I see the price-tag of $0 as being a critical
product feature.

Ajay Shah - Unix on a billion desktops?

* Free software is often less demanding of resources, extending the
lifespan of older hardware. As an example of what this allows, consider
Project Computer Bank, an Australian venture to supply old computer
equipment running GNU/Linux to low income earners, community groups, and
disadvantaged schools.

Freedom From Dependencies

``Community Aid Abroad's vision is for a fair world in which people
control their own lives, their basic rights are achieved and the
environment is sustained.'' (emphasis added)

Free software does not create dependencies on multinational corporations.
Support commonly comes from user groups and online communities, which
often provide vastly better support than commercial alternatives.
Commercial support is available for free software systems, but users of
free software can not be tied to single suppliers or vendors.

Access to the source code greatly increases users' options. It allows not
just the unrestricted sharing of software packages but also their easy
modification to suit local needs and requirements.

The value of free software in avoiding dependencies has been recognised by
businesses and by governments.

Let's say you are a chief technical officer (CTO) at a Fortune 500 company
and you have just spent millions of dollars on a strategic business system
with software you cannot see inside and cannot modify, software that
depends on a single vendor to service. Now are those systems going to
change to serve your business plan or your vendor's business plan?

...it probably will not be long before buying closed-source software for
your key infrastructure is considered the height of irresponsibility.

Eric S. Raymond in Intellectual Capital

"Scandinavia, Germany, and France are some of the main centers of Linux
use. Some people say that this is because companies and the government
want to avoid becoming too dependent on U.S. -- read Microsoft --
products."

Kalle Dalheimer, quoted in OSS Europe

Development of free software is done by those who have the necessary
skills and resources - the resulting products are available for use by
whoever needs it.

With Linux, the people who use the system get to [affect the way] the
system [develops]. It's democracy in the sense that you don't surrender
control. Anybody can do anything. It boils down to [the fact that] you
must be [competent], but that's a good way of separating the people who do
the work. And even the [people who] don't make changes can make
suggestions and can do testing and things like that.

Linus Torvalds, interview with upsidedown.com.

Shared Values

Most free software has been produced through decentralised,
community-based development processes which are usually open to anyone
with the right technical skills (or a willingness to learn) who is
prepared to do the work. Users of free software can join software
development communities and participate in the refinement and improvement
of existing software, or in the development of entirely new programs,
building on what already exists.

Many free software development projects are almost model community
development projects. They are based on open communication, inclusiveness,
personal relationships, and working for the good of the community as a
whole. In a paper Technology and Pleasure, Gisle Hannemyr describes the
history of the "hacker" community, placing it in the artisan tradition and
in opposition to Taylorism. He describes its imperatives as:

* reject hierarchies * mistrust authority * promote decentralization *
share information * serve your community

and includes among its position statements:

* when creating computer artifacts, not only the observable results, but
the craftsmanship in execution matters

* practice is superior to theory

* people should only be judged on merit (not by appearance, age, race or
position)

* you can create art and beauty by the means of a computer

The long-term effects of free software and associated changes are likely
to be significant:

Oscar Wilde says somewhere that the problem with socialism is that it
takes up too many evenings. The problems with anarchism as a social system
are also about transaction costs. But the digital revolution alters two
aspects of political economy that have been otherwise invariant throughout
human history. All software has zero marginal cost in the world of the
Net, while the costs of social coordination have been so far reduced as to
permit the rapid formation and dissolution of large-scale and highly
diverse social groupings entirely without geographic limitation. Such
fundamental change in the material circumstances of life necessarily
produces equally fundamental changes in culture.

Ebden Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of
Copyright

In many ways the ethics of free software reflect that of the Internet
community more generally - a community which is still resisting
commercialisation of the Net.

Education and Technology Transfer

Free software both encourages learning and experimentation and in turn
benefits from it. Free software is widespread in educational institutions,
since access to the source code makes free software an ideal tool for
teaching: indeed much free software began as learning exercises.

Due to low start-up costs and rapid change, software development and the
information economy more generally offer a possible way for the South to
build high value industries, leapfrogging older technologies and even
modes of production. The flourishing Indian software industry provides an
obvious example. But if these industries are built on proprietary products
and protocols owned by multinational corporations, then this will only
reinforce one-sided dependencies. Free software has obvious advantages
here.

Free software lends itself to collaborative, community-based development
at all scales from cottage industry to world-wide efforts involving the
collaboration of thousands of people. Internet access potentially offers
the poor the ability to communicate directly with the rest of the world,
to directly present their own ideas and perspectives. Combined with the
free software development model, it allows them to participate in creating
and moulding the technologies and systems that will determine their
future.

_________________________________________________________________

Free Software in Action

The advantages of free software for community and development
organisations have been recognised by others: The arguments sketched above
apply not just to development organisations but to governments and to some
extent even to businesses.

The United Nations

UNESCO is handing out free Linux CDROMs to community, scientific, and
educational projects in Latin America.

We believe LINUX can play a very important role in Latin American and
Caribbean modernisation, constructing networks to permit a great number of
universities, colleges, schools and educational centers, to connect to
Internet in order to use this fabulous tool to improve their scientific
and cultural levels. In a few words, LINUX is the tool which permits to
reduce the "technological gap" between the countries. LINUX permits the
acces to "the informatics the most advanced" implemented according to the
reduced economic capacities in our region. LINUX is a new way to make
informatics, where the most important thing is "the technical quality and
people solidarity"

And the UNDP is running a Sustainable Development Networking Program, with
support from the Linux vendor Red Hat.

Mexico's Scholar Net (http://www.linux.org.mx/arturo/scholar/)

I work as the project leader of the "Scholar Net", a program that aims to
bring computers and the net to every elementary and mid-level school in
Mexico. We expect to install from 20 to 35 thousand labs per year to a
total of 140,000 centers in the next five years.

Due to matters of cost, reliability and configurability, we plan to use
GNU/Linux to replace the proprietary server options and, now thanks to
GNOME, the proprietary desktop application options.

SatelLife

SatelLife is an international not-for-profit organization employing
satellite, telephone and radio networking technology to serve the health
communication and information needs of countries in the developing world.

http://www.data.com/issue/981021/people.html

For starters, the staff of Satellife had to seek out and master
technologies cheap enough for users in the world's poorest countries but
reliable enough to deliver vital medical information fast. And the
organization didn't have the funds that corporate IT departments have for
equipment and software-so it used free and open-source software to link
users to forums. And as the Internet became a more vital tool, Satellife
had to make sure that users without browsers could still get information
via the Web. It also used second-hand gear where possible and relied on
research institutes and discussion groups, rather than high-priced
consultants, for advice.

The Littlefish Health Project

Project Vision: "To create a user friendly patient information and recall
system on an open source basis with the focus on use by community based
primary health care health organisations in the developing world or remote
and rural areas or areas of need.

(And Daniel L. Johnson has written a paper on free software in medical
information management.)

The Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) An impassioned
but carefully put together argument for use of Linux by the CBAA. Arguing
on both technical and ethical grounds, most of this is directly relevant
to development organisations.

The open source movement, and Linux is particular, are massive volunteer
non-profit projects which share the spirit of community media. It's a
radical alternative movement creating successful mainstream software. In
fact, it's the same movement that produced the software that the internet
revolution depends on. Now the movement has produced a cutting edge
technology which suits the CBAA's needs far better than the commercial
competition. The technology is Linux. A Linux server is one the CBAA could
be proud of.

(Also mentioned in a Newswire story on the politics of software.)

_________________________________________________________________

Conclusion and Recommendations

The free software movement embodies principles consistent with those of
Community Aid Abroad and Oxfam International. Free software products are
tools which fit the needs of Oxfam International members, in many cases
better than alternative proprietary products.

It is therefore recommended that:

* Development organisations should include software in their policies on
ethical purchasing and appropriate technology; such policies should
encourage the use of free software and open protocols.

* Development organisations should encourage and assist project partners
in the deployment of software systems that will enable them to "take
control of their own destiny", and to reduce their dependence on the
developed world. They should consider the major advantages free software
has in this area.

* Development organisations should ultimately try to free themselves from
the shackles of proprietary software.

Danny Yee (danny@anatomy.usyd.edu.au)

_________________________________________________________________

The author is one of the Community Aid Abroad webmasters, a board member
of Electronic Frontiers Australia, and an employee of Sydney University.
But the opinions expressed in this paper are personal and do not
necessarily reflect the policies of any of these organisations.

Thanks to Cameron Tampion, Mike Gifford, Charlie Brady, Greg Taylor, Ronni
Martin, and Richard Stallman for feedback on this document.