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English version

Free Software Law Project

Spanish version

Article 1: The Executive, Judicial and Legislative Powers, the autonomous entities, the decentralized organisms, the enterprises where the State possesses the majority of stocks , the Departmental ( Administrative Divisions) governments, and all the State organisms, must distribute all information, now distributed in closed formats, in at least one open and standard format. All information requested must be accepted in at least one open standard format, without prejudice to accept the same information in a closed format.
In both cases, preference will be given to open and standard formats.

Article 2: In the Public institutions and dependencies mentioned in Article 1, when software licenses are contracted preference will be given to free software licenses, in relation to licenses that only allow the use of the software, or prohibit one of the freedoms of free software. In case Proprietary Software is chosen, the reason must be explained and fundamented. The exchange of information between citizens and the State by Internet must be possible in at least one browser licensed as free software.

Article 3: The Public Educational Institutions must form their students in the use of free software besides the software include in the actual plans.

Article 4: The Executive Power, will regulate, in a period of one hundred and eighty days, the conditions, periods of time, forms in which the transition of the present situation to one that satisfies the conditions of the present law and orientates, the licitations and future contract of computer programs ( software) made to any title.

Exhibitions of reasons

It is the responsibility of the State to oversee the processing and storage of the information in digital formats in order for it to be accessed and modified without restrictions by authorized people and institutions. It is also important not to impose technological limitations in order to ensure the independence between the information itself and the programs that work with this information. In this sense the pillars on which this responsibility lies are the formats by which the data is stored and the programs used to administrate them.

A. The format of data storage

A1) Open formats are a published specification for storing and handling digital data, their structure is known and there are no restrictions on their use. The data stored in open formats does not require proprietary software to be used.

A2) The formats protected by patents will be considered open formats as long as there are no legal limitations for their use and they obey what is indicated in the previous point A1).

The State adoption of a policy to exchange open format data (be for the gathering as for the emission of the data) aims to reach the following objectives:

1. Free access of information by the people, once it has been defined as public domain.
2. Ensure the conservation of public data.
3. Stimulate the development of the national software industry.
4. Provide trust in information and more security in its use.

1. To guarantee the free access of public information by the citizens, it is highly necessary that the file formats and the data codification not be linked to a unique enterprise that provides the software that handles this data. The use of open and standard formats guarantees this free access. It is by all means discriminatory and intolerable that in order to access the lecture of a file made by one State organism the citizen be obliged to use a proprietary program or perform a number of complex format conversion tasks.

2. The relationship between individual and the State depends on the privacy and integrity of this data, which must be adequately protected against the risk of impossibility of access to them during all the lifespan of this data. The current software have quite a short obsolescence period, this period is much shorter than the one required for the information to be available. To link data access to specific software for a specific vendor, is to put the access to the data at risk in a medium term.

To ensure that public data withstands time, it is indispensable that the use and maintenance of software and the access to the data does not depend on the good will of the suppliers, or the monopolist conditions, in many cases imposed by them. In case that the State is unable to dispose of the parameters with which one format was developed, it will be obliged to depend on a proprietary software in order to access his own data.
When using closed formats, the information provided by the State can only be correctly decoded by the format designer, be it an enterprise or physical person of any origin or dimension.

As these closed formats are periodically changed by the producers, a constant technological dependency is generated, obliging the State to permanently upgrade the software it uses, with the risk to be incommunicated in the informatics universe, as of to lose valuable information available. This information, in many cases, was entrusted by the citizens in accordance with the necessities of different State organisms.
When the State employs a closed format to interchange digitalized information with the citizens, it ends up acting as a product promoter for the specific producer.

Furthermore, the State doesn´t have the mechanisms to audit the internal functioning of a proprietary program that processes data, for this reason on the one hand it must trust the information that it receives from the citizens, and on the other hand it can not assume responsibility for the secret or reserved information that the citizens give to it, for the mechanics of this procedure or failures or the appearance of system or program interferences.
Only if you interchange the information in open and standard formats and preserve it in these formats is it possible to guarantee that the State have different options to access this information and that the programs used to handle this information comply with the security levels and confidence required.

3. With the use of proprietary software and closed formats you lack the freedom to contract, generating a technological dependency where the supplier has the possibility to dictate terms, prices and conditions unilaterally. With the use of open and standard formats it is possible to contract different suppliers to develop software to handle the stored information. On the other hand you can stimulate the competition and development of software nation wide.

4. With the use of proprietary software that difficults the access to the data in the closed formats, the size of the files increases considerably, against the people who have old computers or low speed connections. The risks of virus transmissions that are introduced and transmitted within the closed files are also multiplied. Furthermore it is a risk for the privacy of the people who create the document because you do not have the security that the supposedly erased parts where effectively removed and not just marked as erased. The closed formats can facilitate the inclusion within the file of some information that escapes the control of the document producer.

B. The programs

The proprietary software licenses only provide the right to execute the software program and for each copy it is necessary to have a license. On the other hand, there are license contracts that provide, apart from execution rights, the possibility to copy the program freely, to study how it works internally, to modify, to improve or correct the program according to specific needs and also include the permission to distribute these programs freely, independent of the author or original supplier. The programs whose license contracts provide these freedoms are known as free software.
In this sense it will be considered of fundamental importance that the educational system begin to instruct the students about the uses of free software, in order to:

1. Avoid that the State use the educational resources in benefit of one or more enterprises that develop proprietary software, therefore generating a cycle of dependence and demand of proprietary software in the future, limiting the innovation possibilities and intellectual independence of the students.

2. Form the students in the diverse possibilities that the informatics universe offers and not centralize them in the options provided by one single supplier.

3. Free Software is constantly developed and perfectioned by a countless number of qualified programmers from all over the world, obtaining products that are equally stable and with a better or superior quality than the closed or proprietary. Its different products are available on Internet under different types of licenses, or “freedoms”. Generally, these licenses try to reach the commitment to use the software in the same condition that it was provided, even if they receive some improvement as a result of any produced modifications. This universal project is called GNU and is known as “Free Software” for the freedoms that it provides but not necessarily for the price of each product, since “Free Software” is not always free of charge. In 1991 a twenty-one year old finish, Linus Torvalds, presented the Kernel of LINUX, a substantial component of the operational system. This impulsed the use of free software by millions of users. Its use by many enterprises all around the world has had an exponential growth. The amount of servers that use free software in the USA alone, reaches 50% of sales during last year.

The main reasons that led many enterprises to adopt this type of programs are:

1. The freedom to create solutions to fit their needs, starting from preexisting software, which would otherwise be conditioned by the dependency of proprietary software.
2. The security and functional stability obtained by its informatics systems in the production, organization, management and distribution of data.
3. The possibility to continue using hardware that has become obsolete for the requirements of the newer versions of proprietary software .
4. The dramatic cost reduction. This is one of the most important aspects of this decision.
5. The better performance obtained in similar tasks, between free software and proprietary software.

On the other hands, some of the major multinational enterprises that produce software, have adopted free software in different measures, and in some cases, have invested large sums of money in its development.
Many countries have begun public experiences in different levels of the administration, among them China, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, India, Belgium, Italy, the European Union in same aspects, Peru, Thailand, among others. NASA, the US Army and the Brazilian Navy, are other examples of this.
In the same sense, there are many law projects and decrees in different countries. The National Innovation Council of The Republic of South Africa has just proposed the adoption of free software as a State Policy.
Free Software is seen as a viable option that allows developing countries to close the so called Digital Gap, but it also allows the countries to auto-maintain their technological infrastructures, cutting the dependency with the traditional technological suppliers. For this reason this is considered the only sustainable way of technological development.
The use and the production of free software allows, in this sense, to lower the proprietary software import costs, and enhances the possibility to convert the country into an exporter of new generation software.

Definitions:

To the effects of the present law enforcement, we understand by:

1. Program or Software, is any sequence of instructions use by a digital data processing device, to accomplish a specific task or solve a determined problem.

2. Program execution or employment, the act of using the program on any digital data processing device to accomplish one function.

3. User, any juridic or physical person who uses the software.

4. Source code, is the complete group of instructions and original digital files created or modified by the programmer, plus all the digital support files, like data tables, images, specifications, documentation and every other element that will be necessary to make the executable program from them.
As an exception we can exclude from this group those tools and programs that are generally distributed as free software by other means, like, compilers, operative systems and libraries.

5. Free software program, is the program whose license gives the users the following freedoms:

5.1. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
5.2. Unrestricted access to the source code.
5.3. The freedom to study and modify the program.
5.4. The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
5.5. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

6. Proprietary program, any program that does not give you one of the freedoms described above in point five.
7. Open Format, is any format or specification of code and/or transfer information that satisfies the following conditions:

7.1. Are universally available for its lecture and implementation.
7.2. They don´t force the user to use products from suppliers or determined groups.
7.3. Freely implemented by anyone, without payment, rights o charges, except the charges that the certified organism require to certify the fulfillment.
7.4. Don´t benefit one programmer above another for any reason other than the fulfillment of technical standards of implementation.

8. Operative System, is the minimal number of software programs that allows access and control of the physical or hardware resources of the computer. Examples of operative systems are DOS, Windows XP, UNIX, Linux, OS/2, Mac OS, Solaris.

8.1.The Open Operative Systems are those that comply with point 5) -see above-. An example of this type of system is LINUX.
8.2.Proprietary Operative Systems are those that do not comply with point 5) -see above-. An example of this type of system is Windows.

9. Servers are computers that provide a service to a network of computers.