SYNOPSIS

This essentially is the business and technology part of a 2-hour lecture I gave in November 2005 at the University of Tartu in Estonia, restructured for a Debconf audience.

It answers questions like:

- Why are Free Software-based blogging technologies the best CRM, Marketing and Project Management framework?
- Why is Free Software the best argument to convince venture capitalists that they should fund your startup?
- Why is Free Software the best data preservation and support guarantee for both business and government?
- Why is Free Software the best tool for governments and NGO to reach and maintain a dialogue with their audience?

DESCRIPTION

Because it often appears as pioneering technology that fuels innovation and fosters the sort of open standardization that supports internationalization and interoperability, Free Software makes perfect economic sense for everyone, in any country, rich or poor.

As abundantly demonstrated at Debconf5, Debian indeed offers an ever-increasing variety of software for widely diverse purposes and in an ever-increasing number of languages. In truth, Debian arguably is the biggest and most widespread Free Software distribution on the planet, because it serves as the reference upon which most other popular "Linux" distributions are based.

We discuss how Free Software developers can efficiently and eloquently leverage these facts to attract venture capitalist funding, to stimulate business adoption, and to help governments standardize on free and open solutions that guarantee their population a low-cost and equal access to the services.

SEE ALSO

http://q-funk.iki.fi

This talk will focus on one of the most important instruments used to control governments:
the right for the public to gain access to public records, often called freedom of information law, or public's right to officialdocuments.
This principle guarantees transparency in public administration and governments and form the principles on which the governments work and communicate with its citizens.

The freedom of information laws have its history from Anders Chydenius who fought for democracy, equality and human rights in Sweden and Finland and laid the foundation for the Swedish Freedom of Information Law passed in 1766. This was later followed by Columbia in 1888, Finland in 1919 and the USA in 1966.

Freedom of Information is now recognised more and more as a human right and for instance the European Union gives some freedom of information in its Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Even if we don't use our rights very often, they form the basis for government work since it carries with it a knowledge that actions can be monitored by the citizens, and citizens rely on the ability to use these rights when it is called for, either directly, through the press or other organisations.

Software is all around us -- from cell phones to vacuum cleaners, and our governments make heavy use of it in all aspects of its governance. The software used controls what is possible and not possible and to an increasing extent, the decisions in governments are made automatically by software, interpreting the information put before it and evaluating it based on the logical rules with which it has been programmed.

In many cases, not even the governments themselves have access to the software in the detail required to assertain that it actually functions properly in all cases.

The use of Free Software in governments are important in all areas, but perhaps particularly so when decisions taken by the software in question influence the life of individual citizens.

This would enable the citizens of a country to gain access to the software used in all government functions, and to put this in its proper context to evaluate its functioning and assertain that it functions justly and properly in accordance with the laws established by the parliaments.

The talk will go cover the basic principles of freedom of information and the problems we're faced with when trying to apply this to Free Software. It will talk about why it's not enough for Free Software to fall under the same freedom of information laws as other works relevant to our democracy.

In talking about this, it will also examine why governments, in particular in the western northern hemisphere, are not using Free Software to the largest extent possible, and try to discover what ways we, as Free Software developers and users, can help governments in this task. Ie, is there anything we can do to assist governments in using Free Software, and can we do so without affecting our other users?

This talk is an expansion of a previous presentation I've made in Free
Software workshop of the 2nd World Summit of Cities and Local authorities on the Information Society.