Hi Erik, > Now my questions: > * How can we oppose the argument that publicly financed software released as > Free Software is anticompetitive?
I've found the following argument to be somehow convincing. How do you know that a SaaS (Software as a Service) is not a free software? Well, you probably don't and most customers don't care. If free softwares should be considered anti-competitive, then free SaaS should be considered anti-competitive too. But it's not just "free SaaS": any kind of SaaS comes with hidden operational costs which prevents a rational approach of what would be a fair price. (Google Maps prices, for example, were certainly not very fair regarding competition: they first killed the market then increased their price a lot.) When a company deploys free softwares, they are just running a kind of service over some hidden operational costs, that of the free softwares themselves, the difference being that those costs are supported by the free software communities. > * What can we bring up on the other hand in favor of publishing as Free > Software from a competitive point of view? > (except the usual non-dependencies) IT companies deploying free softwares compete on better integration, customization, documentation, support and maintenance, instead of competing on supposedly better closed code. > * What other arguments can be made in that context to balance an even > anticompetitive decision pro Free Software (like public duty to supply, > binding public money with public goods etc)? Not knowing whether prices of commonly used SaaS are fair (like the price of Google services paid by many universities) is to me a big argument -- at least to destroy the naive vision that it's easy to assess the fairness of a price in a closed-source business model. > * Are there more examples in Europe in that - like in Switzerland - national > courts decided in favor of publishing publicly financed software as Free > Software? In France, the law for a Digital Republic from 2016 simply says that publicly-funded software is like publicly-funded data and should be published as free software by default: "open source" is a particular case of open data. Of course, we're not there yet: administrations have yet to understand free software, free licenses, and publish more code. But we are going in the right direction. You can also mention the "Open-source contribution policy": https://disic.github.io/politique-de-contribution-open-source/en/ It basically says that administrations are encouraged to contribute to existing free softwares and that public employees don't need to ask for permission for this, they just need time. All best, -- Bastien _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
