NZZ: War of Standards (in German)

Posted on 20. June, 2007 by Georg Greve

The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) has an interesting article "Krieg der Standards"  ("War of Standards") about the MS-OOXML vs ODF debate.

This is an article worth reading, as it exposes quite well the issues of standardisation, the dangers of lack of standardisation and Open Standards, and the contradictions in the claims of Microsoft regarding MS-OOXML.

If you want your colleagues, friends or family to read just one article that gives them a basic understanding of what is going on, this is not a bad choice.

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Why more standards mean less competition

Posted on 15. June, 2007 by Georg Greve

The Open Forum Europe (OFE), one of Europe’s industry groups, has published a white paper on Dual Standards that is available for download as PDF.

Since Microsoft is making the claim that competition on standards is a good thing, this is something that should be read by all people active in the MS-OOXML vs ODF debate, in particular if they are working in the national standardisation bodies that will get to vote in ISO/IEC.

Although it is counterintuitive for some people at first, there is a reason why standardisation ultimately has the goal to arrive at only one standard per function.

Adding more standards will simply undermine the value of each of them, and reduce competition, because competition should happen on the basis of the implementation, product and program — not on the grounds of the standard.

There are several real-life examples that might help someone not familiar with the debate to understand the issue:

  • Power Plugs: If we had multiple, vendor specific power plugs in each country that only fit into electricity supplier specific sockets, we could normally only buy appliances of the vendor that has the plugs fitting into the sockets in our house.
  • Car controls: If every car manufacturer had dramatically different ways of controlling the car, we would need manufacturer-specific driving licenses and could only buy cars from the manufacturer for which we have a license and to which we have gotten used.

Both these examples fall short in their complexity when compared to the office document issue, as the 6000+ pages specification for MS-OOXML  demonstrates quite well. And that documentation is still woefully incomplete, as it lacks the full description of all the proprietary components referenced in MS-OOXML.

When taking this into account (and thus ruling out fully functional power converters, for instance) it should become immediately clear why this does not help competition.

In fact, the power image might even carry a litte further:

One electricity company has a monopoly consisting of 95% market share in households covered. But this company also builds  and sells appliances, a market in which competition is much stronger. So it suddenly changes its power sockets such that other appliance manufacturers can no longer build devices that work well these sockets.

In order to hide the fact, the manufacturer calls these sockets "OpenSockets" and asks for ISO certification — regardless of the fact that noone else will ever be able to build plugs that fit well into these sockets. But even if someone were to manage that, they could probably still be sued.

In order to then placate criticism for introducing another standard and to increase the chance of ISO acceptance, the company then seeks to justify itself with the idea of competition of the standards and accuses the other appliance manufacturers of foul play.

This seems a somewhat fitting metaphor of what is really happening around MS-OOXML.

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Back from India

Posted on 15. June, 2007 by Georg Greve

Around 06:20 this morning I finally arrived back in Europe after a very interesting last day in Mumbai at the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (HBCSE) with Nagarjuna and his great crew.


The Free Software group at the HBCSE plus Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat

Besides their fascinating work on the semantic database of the SELF Project they also help introduce some of India’s most talented and intelligent children to Free Software both in theory and practice. So yesterday they had an afternoon with theoretical lectures followed by an introduction to Python, and it only took the first students a little over an hour to write their first lines of Python code.


Some of India’s brightest young talents already programming Python on their first Free Software afternoon

Something else that occupied a part of my brainshare during the entire visit was meeting a young, dedicated Free Software enthusiast by the name of Krishnakant Mane. Krishnakant not only is a very smart person with a talent for languages (he surprised me by suddenly speaking in German), he also happens to be blind.

Through him I learned how powerful Free Software has become for the visually impaired. Krishnakant is a talented software developer working on the backend of the Gnowsys system. But he not only uses and programs computers with GNU/Linux, he also installs them.

Thanks to the Orca project and the work done by the Ubuntu Team to allow for an advanced accessibility interface even during installation, it is possible for a visually impaired person to install GNU/Linux. I’m not aware that a similar possibility exists for any proprietary operating system.


Krishnakant Mane. Free Software developer, teacher and activist. He may be blind, but he can free your computer.

So besides developing Free Software, Krishnakant is also touring India, helping other visually impaired people to use Free Software and showing them how Free Software can help them regain a part of freedom that is normal to most of us. In fact, he helped establish a training center for blind people to spread that knowledge in Trivandrum, Kerala, which I also visited during my time there.

Besides that, he also gives speeches on Free Software and did the introduction for me during my speech at HBCSE (Meena also had a short blog entry about it) with Orca to demonstrate to the audience the level of accessibility available today.

This is an experience that I think would be valuable for many people, in particular in the visually impaired community, and I hope that Krishnakant will find the time to document the amazing work he is doing in this area.

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Last night in India

Posted on 13. June, 2007 by Georg Greve

Tonight is my last night in India after one and a half extremely busy weeks that took me to Mumbai, Calcutta and Trivandrum and allowed me to meet some old and new friends in the global Free Software community. Since people often ask me what I do during the day, maybe this can give you an idea of the life of a travelling Free Software advocate.

Mumbai

My base of operations in Mumbai was the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (HBCSE) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), one of FSFE‘s partners in the SELF Project. More specifically, the HBCSE is working on Gnowsys as a backed for the SELF platform. So obviously a good part of the time was spent discussing our common project. But since Nagarjuna also happens to be the chairman of our sister organisation FSF India, we ended up discussing many more issues in the global Free Software comunity, including the current debate around MS-OOXML vs ODF.

On Thursday last week I spoke at the HBCSE on Free Software and Science before giving an interview to CNBC, after which Nagarjuna and I had to hurry to the airport to make our way to Calcutta. At the airport we then learned that we had plenty of time because our flight ended up with more than 4 hours of delay, bringing us to Calcutta around 03:00 in the morning.

Calcutta

The next morning Nagarjuna and I were scheduled to speak at a meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at their session on the Open Document Format (ODF). I had the honor to open the event with my talk on European perspectives on interoperability, followed by Dr Debesh Das, Minister in Charge, Dept. of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal, who made some truly forward-looking statements.

Minister Das spoke clearly how self-reliance of countries was difficult in hardware, but quite achievable in software, and that governments should prefer to pay their own people. He highlighted his concerns about the money wasted on proprietary software and said clearly that West Bengal will start a state center on Free Software backed by the universities of the state. He also left no doubt that Open Document Format (ODF) is the only option, and that in particular also students in Universities should use only ODF in the future.

So after some more discussions with the people from industry who were attending the workshop, Nagarjuna and I made our way to a quick meeting with local Free Software advocates before heading back to the airport, because we had to get back to Mumbai Friday night.

Trivandrum

Saturday morning my flight left Mumbai for Trivandrum, Kerala and this being my third flight within India, I could not help but notice that airline food in India generally seems vastly superior to airline food elsewhere. It actually tastes good.

The rest of Saturday and the Sunday was spent in meetings, talks and some sightseeing with the great people of the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE), who are currently starting to work on the migration of Keralas administration to Free Software, following the political decision to switch all of public administration.

It was especially good to meet Arun M of FSF India and James Mathew again, who I had last seen them at the GPLv3 conference in Tokyo. In fact I should use this opportunity to point out that the brochure about "Free Software Projects in Public Enterprises of Kerala" is available as PDF on the SPACE web site.

Monday started with a speech at the Technopark Kerala, where I once more spoke about Free Software and Science, followed by an intensive discussion. In the afternoon I then tried with limited success to catch up on all the email that had been piling up.


Georg Greve in the traditional hand-woven Kurta in front of the Christ Nagar HR Sec. School in Kerala

On Tuesday I spoke about Free Software to students of the the Christ Nagar HR Sec. School in Kerala, who for the first time heard that there was Free Software, and what it means for their lives. I gave the talk wearing a traditional hand-woven Indian Kurta because it has a strong connection to Indias history, in particular the struggle for independence when Mahatma Ghandi encouraged people to weave their own cloth. So there is a strong similarity to Free Software, which enables people to "weave their own code," and control their own lives. Although I usually don’t speak in high schools, I have to say that this was a pure joy. The students were extremely attentive and by the end still remembered the four freedoms.

In fact, I was told that a couple of them visited the SPACE offices the same day to get more information and some CDs with Free Software, which made me quite happy. Not that I was there to see this myself, because at the time I was already giving my second speech at the College of Engineering in Trivandrum, this time to post-graduate students and faculty staff about how Free Software relates to their choices in the professional life, and how to build a living on Free Software.


The amazing people of SPACE in Kerala, unfortunately without Arun M

After a farewell dinner in the evening there was barely enough time on Wednesday morning it was off to the airport again, but not before paying a brief visit to a master of Kalarippayat who in the traditional way still works as a healer and teacher of this ancient martial art.

So after this I am now back at HBCSE, where everything began, and tomorrow I’ll fly back to Europe, will do some laundry and then make my way to Brussels on Sunday, since I have several meetings there next week.

Indian Impressions

Of course all of this is woefully incomplete and only shows the barest skeleton of the past 10 days, which were filled with many new impressions, including fantastic food. If you asked me for a one line summary, I’d tell you that India is a country with many cultures, and several contradictions, sometimes with a fundamentally different outlook on society, and extremely friendly and hospitable people who remain calm even in the most chaotic traffic and are not fazed by the unforseen that life always has in stow here.

Indians are also amazingly good hosts, and my gratitude goes to all who have taken care of me so well during my stay. Thank you, my friends, I hope we’ll see each other soon again.

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Back from Transylvania (unbitten)

Posted on 19. May, 2007 by Georg Greve

I’ve just arrived back home from the eLiberatica conference 2007 in Brasov, Romania. The conference itself was great fun: The organisers were extremely good hosts and the crowd engaged in the presentations and discussions during and after sessions.

Furthermore, Brasov is right in the heart of the Southern Carpathians in Transylvania and around the corner from Dracula’s castle.

Unfortunately we did not get to visit the castle, because everyone was so engaged in Free Software discussions that Friday flew by like nothing. All I saw of the area was the city of Brasov at night, which is a very beautiful old town with lots of places to sit outside and have a beer with friends.

But from discussions with many people I realised that Romanians seem to have a strong tendency to embrace the new and I’ve certainly never seen so many EU flags outside Brussels. It is great that people in the new EU member states are so enthusiastic about the EU. Those of us who had to deal with its problems for so many years sometimes forget what an amazing project the European Union actually is.

Another thing I learned is that there are some very interesting projects in Romania, for instance Yate, which seems to be a very mature and easy to configure telephony engine for Voice over IP based on a very powerful design that I will have to test out.

All in all I’ve decided that I should definitely go back there and spend a few more days to discover this extraordinary country and its people.

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OLPC = “One License Per Child?”

Posted on 29. April, 2007 by Georg Greve

The past days found me attending the Yale A2K2 conference in New Haven where an insipring group of people were discussing issues of the knowledge society and how to enable Access to Knowledge for everyone. Naturally, Free Software played a major role in this, as it is the only way for governments to have control over their IT infrastruture and policy.

One of the items discussed was also the "One Laptop Per Child" project, but much to my dismay I had to find out about the latest briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the OLPC. Apparently the OLPC is now catering to the needs and interests of Microsoft and is working to update the hardware to fit the needs of Microsoft Windows. This would then allow the laptop to be shipped with the $3 Microsoft package. The article shows no reasons for this move, which raises price of the ‘100$ laptop’ to 175$ and is obviously counter-productive to the originally stated goals of the OLPC. So I’d be very interesting in finding out the details of that deal.

As Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes, this is clearly a strong blow against Free Software. It also seems like the end of the OLPC project as we know it, since now Microsoft will most likely be spending significant resources "nudging" governments into spreading the OLPC with Microsoft Windows to turn children as early as possible into habitual users of Microsoft.

In effect, OLPC now really appears to stand for "One (Microsoft) License Per Child."

Several people who work in development were already sceptical whether simply putting technology into the hands of children would solve any problem, especially when the funds spent would be enough to build and maintain very well-equipped public schools.

When adding this latest bit of information to the picture, indeed it seems that countries should very carefully consider the idea of whether they want to spend that money on getting their children dependent on Microsoft.

From a sustainable development perspective they should even consider turning down the laptops when Microsoft will offer them gratis in combination with Microsoft Windows — which seems the logical next step.

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FSFLA liberates tax declaration in Brazil

Posted on 28. April, 2007 by Georg Greve

As featured in my March entry “When governments mandate proprietary software,” Brazil had mandated that all citizens file their tax declaration with a proprietary program distributed by the government.

Alexandre Oliva of FSFLA, FSFE‘s sister organisation in Latin America, reverse engineered that software and created a Free Software implementation, which he successfully used to file his taxes.

You can read more at FSFLA’s web site and the software is already available online.

Apparently this is sending shock-waves through the federal tax authority already. Hopefully they will have the sense to offer this program to all citizens of Brazil very soon.

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Update on OpenXML vs ODF

Posted on 20. March, 2007 by Georg Greve

Thanks to one of my favorite web comics, Everybody loves Eric Raymond, I discovered two rather interesting articles in the OpenXML and ODF debate.

The first article is by Miguel de Icaza from end of January in which he says that the EU Prosecutors are wrong, starting with a bashing of  ECIS council Thomas Vinje, who is coordinating the industry support of the European Commission case in the EU antitrust case against Microsoft. You can see here who are those "some companies" that Miguel is referring to.

Miguel then goes into a valiant defense of OpenXML, trying to show that ODF were at least as bad as OpenXML, and that statements against OpenXML had to be politically motivated.

Rob Weir then wrote a response in which he goes through a step-by-step analysis of Miguels claims, which leaves very little doubt about the serious flaws in Miguels posting.

In his rather undignified response Miguel then tries to assert a purely authoritative argument based on his previous work on gnumeric which leaves the main point of multiple compatible implementations of ODF unanswered.

Robs response to this is rather amusing and insightful

To Miguel’s question, on whether I have actually done any coding in this area, or whether I am "just another armchair general". I prefer to let my words and logic stand for themselves. A resume is a poor substitute for a sound argument.

only to  continue with detailing a resume that easily competes with that of Miguel. One might even say it out-resumes it.

One thing that struck me as very insightful about Miguels posting was his analysis that with OpenXML succeeding as an ISO standard, Open Standards would no longer be a useful path to promote Free Software in the governmental area:

The real challenge today that open source faces in the office space is that some administrations might choose to move from the binary office formats to the OOXML formats and that "open standards" will not play a role in promoting OpenOffice.org nor open source.

This is probably a correct assessment.

If Microsoft succeeds in having its proprietary OpenXML format accepted as an "Open Standard", the term will have become meaningless and the efforts to break the Microsoft lock-in will have lost years of work.  As Miguel correctly points out, this is the political motivation behind OpenXML:

Open standards and the need for public access to information was a strong message. This became a key component of promoting open office, and open source software. This posed two problems: […] Second, it assumed that Microsoft would stand still and would not react to this new change in the market.

The first problem he described was that many of the people promoting Free Software in this way neglected the need to stress a fully Free Software implementation of the office suite. With this I fully agree.

So based on Miguels argument: Because there are fully Free Software implementations of ODF and there is no indication there will ever be a Free Software implementation of OpenXML, OpenXML represents a step back for Free Software.

On a related note: Here is an article that describes the attempts to test the OpenOffice.org plugin written by Miguels employer to read/write OpenXML files. The result:

All in all, my experiences with the OpenXML translator were less than positive, and reports on OpenOffice.org-related newsgroups and forums indicate that I’m not alone. The translator is useless when installed in a stock version of OpenOffice.org; Novell apparently focused on making the translator work with its own flavor of OpenOffice.org. Even then, the translator’s performance is far from perfect. While Novell’s attempts to improve compatibility between OpenOffice.org and Office 2007 are commendable, the current result of the company’s endeavors are less than impressive.

The ODF plugin for Microsoft Word seems to fare much better. Although it still has some glitches that should be worked out, the authors conclusion is that standardising on ODF is the way to go.

So more than three months after the publication of my article "Novells Danaergeschenk" on Groklaw I think that the basic conclusions still hold.

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LWN.net: The road to freedom in the embedded world

Posted on 16. March, 2007 by Georg Greve

    I wrote an article for LWN.net about the status of Free Software in the embedded world and where we need to intensify our efforts.

    For your convenience, I’m mirroring the article here, as well:

The road to freedom in the embedded world

If I had to choose the single moment that defines when the Free Software movement became self-aware, it would be the 1983 publication of the GNU manifesto by Richard Stallman. Despite its age it is amazingly up to date. Free Software has come a long way since that time; creating an alternative by inspiring people to put together the GNU Project piece by piece on a proprietary platform.

Only with the publication of the Linux kernel were people able to see pure Free Software operating systems running on their computers in the 90s. But they were still booting off a proprietary BIOS, and we also saw an increasing tendency to put hardware functionality into proprietary firmware. Only recently have projects such as LinuxBIOS managed to bring more freedom to the BIOS, although notebooks still are problematic. The issue of proprietary firmware is still being worked on, including by the FSF.

Compared to the situation in the personal computer area, embedded devices are still several years behind, but there are people who are working hard to catch up. I recently had the pleasure to learn a little more about this exciting field.

One device that a lot of people have in their homes or offices are routers to connect to the internet. Until not so long ago, these used to be entirely proprietary. That is no longer true. Not only do several vendors provide routers with more or less free firmware based on the Linux kernel, but the OpenWRT project and its younger offspring the FreeWRT project have also made some amazing advances in this area.

However even though FreeWRT has a web interface to build custom firmware online, both are still catching up with the freedom, ubiquity and sophistication of modern GNU/Linux desktop distributions.

There are still problems with hardware compatibility and drivers, as both distributions are still confined to a certain chipset, and locked into the 2.4 Linux kernel series because of proprietary drivers for the wireless card built by Broadcom, a manufacturer that has proven itself to be very uncooperative towards the Free Software community.

Getting rid of these restrictions to freedom is a collaborative effort with many different players, including FSFE’s Freedom Task Force, which helped the OpenWRT team to avoid making mistakes in the reverse engineering of the Broadcom wireless driver, such that the result will then be fully usable by all Free Software.

The situation with mobile phones and PDAs is even worse than that of routers. Until very recently it was close to impossible to find mobile phones that were running Free Software and gave the user control over what they were doing.

One of the first companies that tried to answer requests for Free Software mobile phones was Trolltech with their Qtopia Greenphone. Maybe because this was the first time this was tried, and maybe because they didn’t consult enough community voices before launching the phone, they made some mistakes. One of them was the overly restrictive EULA terms, which Trolltech quickly corrected after being confronted with the problem.

This was not the only problem. The Greenphone’s package management is still proprietary, although that problem can be mitigated by using the ipkg package manager instead. Ultimately it seems that everything but the communication stack can be replaced by Free Software in this way. So the Greenphone was a step in the right direction, but it is not yet good enough.

The interest it raised probably also helped bringing about the OpenMoko phone, which will ship very soon and which is taking another big step toward freedom. Like the Greenphone, the GSM stack remains proprietary, though. Reasons for this appear to be a thicket of cross-licensed patents and regulatory concerns about frequency usage and transmission strength.

Many politicians are concerned that tinkering with these could impair the ability of other people to communicate, including the ability to access emergency services. Their argument is that the potential damage done by tinkering is greater than the damage of not having the freedom to change the code. This is a reincarnation of the old "your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose" argument, and it is not easily discarded. We need to convince society with good answers to this and because of that, the GSM stack is likely to remain a difficult area for some time.

Depending on when you start to count, it took our community at least 10 years to address the issue of the proprietary BIOS on our PCs, but we did not let this stop us from improving our GNU/Linux Desktops. In the same way I believe we should work to create maximum freedom on mobile phones.

Other possible candidates have been launched by Nokia, namely the 770 and N800 internet tablets. Both devices are running a Linux kernel with a very small GNU/Busybox system using Debian package management.

Because they do not need the GSM stack, these devices might be made entirely free, though unfortunately they are not being shipped that way. They come with the proprietary Opera browser and a Flash player, which are easily uninstalled and can be replaced by a Mozilla port called Minimo; maybe Gnash can be compiled for them as well.

But there is more work waiting to be done: In a sad kind of irony Nokia seems to have chosen the Gtk+ library over Qt because that would allow them to keep part of their helper library for the embedded small screen proprietary. There are also other parts that are still kept proprietary, like the boot loader and battery charging application. They also seem to share the proprietary firmware problem with the personal computer platform. Even the flashing utility is proprietary software at the current point in time.

This has made some people very sceptical. It may even turn out that we will not be able to free these specific devices entirely without Nokia’s help on the hardware interfaces, which may never come. But working to free them will inevitably end up providing more freedom, although maybe not on these specific devices. Experience gained can be used in many ways, and Free Software written can be transferred to other platforms.

Like the Greenphone, these Nokia devices provide a substantial step towards freedom, but are not yet good enough. So they have to be seen as an intermediate step towards freedom in the embedded world. Both Trolltech and Nokia deserve praise for making a step into the right direction, as well as constructive criticism on the remaining proprietary parts, which should also be set free.

There are projects that have already gotten very far in this effort for other devices, like the Familiar Project for the iPAQ which, I was told, is now running fully Free Software except for the wireless driver. And there are other devices that seem capable of running Familiar, like the Siemens Simpad, which also spawned its own community project to set it free. So maybe a FreeMaemo.org project is what we need for the Nokia internet tablets.

An essential element in truly achieving freedom in the embedded world will be to further strengthen the Free Software community in this area and enable more Free Software developers to tinker with these devices.

One person who has done extraordinary work in this area is Harald Welte. His signature is also visible all over the OpenMoko project and the way it actively reaches out to build a strong developer community. We need more people like him and the other OpenMoko developers, and I hope you will take a look at their call for GPL’ed wireless drivers and application developers.

We also need to get more of the devices into the hands of capable developers. This is what Armijn Hemel of gpl-violations.org did during FOSDEM 2007 when he gave a bunch of routers to the OpenWRT project so they would have more devices to work with and set free.

Ultimately freedom is not static. It is a process that involves a lot of work. It is also a differential question: There are steps towards more freedom, which are good, and steps towards less freedom, which cause problems — if not immediately, then in the future. The choices of which direction to take were recently described by FSFLA as "The fifth freedom."

As a community, we have set the personal computer free to a very large extent. We are not yet as far with embedded devices, but there are first signs of the Free Software community growing into this area.

With the possible exception of the GSM stack, I believe we have good reason to expect 100% Free Software devices in the near future by starting from the most free, although imperfect, options available and setting them free entirely.

Through this effort we’ll not only see the Free Software community flourish in this area and we are also likely to see more hardware vendors willing to supply the community and people who value their freedom with such devices.

Eventually it will be possible to enter the store and buy such a device running only Free Software out of the box, which is what I really want. And with projects such as the GPE Palmtop Environment we will be able to use the same software environment on different hardware devices; something that is common on personal computers, and a great advantage.

Working for this goal can serve to strengthen Free Software on the desktop, because integration of the mobile devices with desktop computers is an important issue. With Free Software it could be possible to use the same software on both, possibly in different versions and from different vendors. The result would be seamless integration that proprietary software might not be able to achieve across vendor boundaries.

It seems only a question of time until someone picks up on this and offers the combination of freedom and convenience to people. In the end, by walking forward on the road to embedded freedom, we might end up strengthening Free Software overall.

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UNESCO publishing paper on “Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies”

Posted on 14. March, 2007 by Georg Greve

UNESCO has published a paper on "Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies" which follows up on discussions during the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

The paper also talks about the OLPC project and includes a brief introduction into Free Software:

Free Software: Access to Information and Knowledge

By Georg Greve

Information and knowledge have always been at the heart of human evolution: They have shaped societies, helped build peace and were reason for war. Information and knowledge in the hand of a few can enslave entire peoples. Used wisely they can liberate them. Information and communication technologies have fundamentally changed the rules for access to both information and knowledge. Digitalization has for the first time made it conceivable to transfer information in real time, without loss and at virtually no cost, across the planet.

Software is a cultural technique at the heart of this change, the medium that shapes this evolutionary step. Software codifies the rules along which information is exchanged and converted to knowledge. It controls who can do this and under which conditions: Access to and control over software determines, in part, today’s knowledge and power structures. That is why software is such a controversial and central issue.

Software can be designed to give all power to change and enforce rules to a single person or group; this is the default approach in proprietary or non-free software.

But software can also be designed to give all users power over their own computers, and the right to determine how to interact with others in this new, virtual environment. For this right to be fully provided, software must give its users four fundamental freedoms: the freedom of unlimited use for any purpose; the freedom to study the software and learn how it works; the freedom to modify the software to adapt it to the needs of others; and the freedom to copy and distribute the software in original or modified form.

The rules of proprietary software make many dependant on the good will of a very few. The rules of Free Software provide an equal and independent playing field, which is why it is a natural choice for all activities that seek to promote Access to Information and Knowledge for everyone.

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