That's an interesting quote you got there... In Brazil at least, it's currently inconstitutional to declare free/libre software as *mandatory* through *legislation* ([1][2]). Noting that, at least in Brazil, the major sector in legislation is the legislative, but the administrative and the judiciary can also affect the legislation in some way.
Brazil's Federal Constitution defines, among other things, what public administrators can do (and everything not there is forbidden). This constitution exposes that the administrator have to follow some principles, one of these talks about public administration efficiency. However, the efficiency principle serves as guide and comes as priority of evaluation over the remaining principles ([1]). Furthermore, at least in the researches made on the interpretation of Brazilian laws and norms, the "public administration efficiency" is beyond the general "bring results with less resource usage" (that is: optimizing the means), in order to also include the quality of the result ([1]). However, as I said, free/libre software usage can't be mandated in *legislation* in Brazil, but the public administration can mandate it through procurement, either as a requirement, or with a criteria with punctuation/weight heavier than the other criterias ([1]). In the first case (mandated in the procurement), there's no discrimination, at least according to [1]. However, I must add my personal note here: if we take that case upside-down, and imagine a procurement limited to some some non-free software known by name; or limited in a way that explicitly writes "non-free software", "closed source software" (I do know that we're not open source, but let's assume they don't know that) or "non-libre software", then we might have a problem with the argument made by the reference [1]. :( In the second case (with higher weight), it might be that no candidate attends the criteria, or that the weight isn't set high enough in order to make the compliant candidates stand out (however, I didn't investigate if there is a standard as to how to set the weights, so I don't know if the act of "making something stand out just by being compliant with one criteria" is even legal). [1] <http://bibliotecadigital.fgv.br/dspace/bitstream/handle/10438/2673/FGV-CTS%20-%20Software%20livre.pdf> (CC BY 2.5 BR) [2] <http://www2.senado.leg.br/bdsf/bitstream/handle/id/243078/Caderno3.pdf?sequence=1> (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 BR) -- - https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno - Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com gratis). - "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre. Por favor, use o GNU Ring ou o Tox. - Contato: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno#vCard - Arquivos comuns aceitos (apenas sem DRM): Corel Draw, Microsoft Office, MP3, MP4, WMA, WMV. - Arquivos comuns aceitos e enviados: CSV, GNU Dia, GNU Emacs Org, GNU GIMP, Inkscape SVG, JPG, LibreOffice (padrão ODF), OGG, OPUS, PDF (apenas sem DRM), PNG, TXT, WEBM. _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
