FW: FLOSS/raziskava

[Ales Kosir]

Vredno ogleda: http://www.maailma.kaapeli.fi/FLOSS_for_dev.html.

Se posebej je treba poudariti tole raziskavo
http://www.maailma.kaapeli.fi/FLOSSReport1.0.html, ki govori o rabi proste
programskeopreme v izobrazevalne namene. Porocilo je sicer dolg dokument, a
vreden branja.

Povzetek iz http://www.maailma.kaapeli.fi/FLOSSReport1.0.html:

Conclusions:
Is FLOSS a useful and significant tool for the developing countries? We are
convinced that FLOSS clearly has the potential to help democratization and
positively help find solutions to the most pressing problems faced by the
populations of developing countries. More specifically, we see its relevance
in the following specific fields:

Democratization

Even a quick look at the use of computers in the education sector, NGOs,
alternative media, and civil society is enough to convince us of the
potential of FLOSS. Students, teachers, journalists, and democracy activists
have been using computers, email, web publishing, desktop publishing, and
internet to get their message across the world, participating in societal
debates, acquiring as well as disseminating knowledge, and skills. 

All of that can for sure be done without it but FLOSS has some intrinsic
characteristics that make it a convincing and integral ally of
democratization process.

Community and Cooperation - As described earlier, community orientation is
one of the basic elements of FLOSS. The development process of Free and Open
Source Software requires participation and the active role of communities,
and the outcome and success of the work greatly depends on how well the
community can communicate and cooperate - both key elements of democracy. 
Freedom - Freedom is the raison d'être of Free and Open Source Software
movements. As described in chapter 7, any software can successfully be used
by anybody for any purpose, but the full potential of FLOSS can only be
realised if extensive political freedoms exist, creating an environment
conducive for the existence of a community of hackers; after all, without
hackers there is no FLOSS. 
Openness and Transparency - FLOSS is openness. There is hardly a more
practical way to demonstrate the necessity and importance of openness and
freedom of information than FLOSS itself. 
Active Participation - FLOSS, in addition to being a tool, is also a way to
activate civil society and NGOs and to improve their capacity to participate
in political debate and other forms of social and political life. 

Education and Research

FLOSS has a complementary and reciprocal relationship to education. One
needs an educated section of the population to fulfil the full potential of
FLOSS, and at the same time FLOSS helps, enhances, and complements education
by providing tools to promote education. 

In the case of education in computer sciences, FLOSS provides opportunities
which nothing else can: 

Unrestricted access to the source code. 
An environment of unlimited experimentation and tinkering. 
Collaboration and interaction with a community of programmers, coders and
users around the world. 
In the case of the promotion of education, in addition to providing ready
and available tools, FLOSS provides positive examples from projects around
the globe. In practice this means that if someone in some other place has
created a tool to reach a specific educational goal, one can take it as a
starting point and build on it, without the need to "reinvent the wheel".
The Dspace project and the Koha library software, mentioned earlier, are but
two simple examples of such possibilities. As far as collaboration is
concerned, Sourceforge.Net is perhaps the biggest collaboration project ever
created, uniting tens of thousands of software projects and hundreds of
thousands of people around the world. FLOSS itself has been called the most
collaborative human effort ever.

In addition to the above, the inherent qualities of FLOSS make it a prime
tool for achieving local language educational software, especially for
languages which are not deemed commercially viable for proprietary software
vendors. These languages include not only languages from developing
countries, but many small European languages like the Sami language in the
Nordic countries, Catalan, Basque etc, opening new possibilities for the
speakers of these languages.

Alleviation of poverty.

If the adoption of FLOSS in developing countries is done wisely, it can help
stimulate indigenous software industry and create local jobs. 

In the case of Government spending, the resources potentially saved from
license fees can be invested in local segments of industry, which has the
biggest potential of job creation, and thus helping alleviate poverty. In
the case of the private sector, money saved from license fees can enhance
the competitiveness of a company, inducing it to invest more in areas it
deems necessary, including job creation.

Reducing conflicts

Communities of FLOSS developers and users from opposite sides in a war or
other type of conflicts can not only talk to each other but can potentially
open channels of communication beyond the control of government and
authorities. This possibility, not realised and utilized so far, can
potentially help reduce many ongoing conflicts and prevent future ones.

Enhancing independence

Developing countries can use FLOSS to reduce dependence on industrial
countries, thus enhancing political, economic and technological
independence. FLOSS technologies are simply there to be taken and utilized:
no one is there to ask questions or create hindrances.

Meeting international obligations

Developing countries can use FLOSS to address the issues of illegally copied
software, thus meeting some of the requirements of the TRIPs agreement.

Recommendations:

The potentials shown in this survey of Free (Libre) and Open Source software
are well in line with the Finnish development policy aims, as they are
described in "Finland's Policy on Relations with Developing Countries" (Oct
1998) and other guiding documents of the Finnish ODA. Also, Finland is
identified around the world as the native country of the father of the Linux
kernel, as well as some other notable figures in FLOSS communities and
software development. We, therefore, consider it very proper for the Finnish
Ministry for Foreign Affairs to use, promote and support Free (Libre) and
Open Source Software in multiple ways. 

The preparatory process for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS,
2003/2005) would offer a good opportunity for Finland to promote and
identify with FLOSS on a world platform, and thus take advantage of the fact
that in the ITC sector Finland has had, and continues to have, remarkable
contributions to the rest of the world other than the NOKIA company, with
its products and services, as good as they as such are. 
Given the advantages in cost, quality and stability, we would recommend the
MFA to further research, survey and consider the use of the FLOSS
alternative whenever applicable, or considered feasible, within the MFA ITC
systems. The Finnish NGO Coalition KEPA will during 2003 shift to Linux, and
could provide practical experience to those interested. In the long run,
this could lead to a welcome situation, where the Ministry itself would not
only be a user of FLOSS software, but also a contributor to the code. This
would also within the Ministry develop skills necessary in training
developing country governments in FLOSS. 

For Finnish ODA programmes, Free (Libre) and Open Source Software have a lot
to offer and a lot to gain. Where Information and Communications
Technologies are used as tools for efficient administration or other
applications, we would recommend a step-by-step survey and consideration of
the FLOSS alternatives in comparison to proprietary solutions. Further,
surveying the needs and uses of, for example, database solutions in Finnish
projects in different parts of the world with e-governance, e-democracy or
e-education links, could well lead to a decision to develop an easily
adaptable FLOSS tool, and its translation into local languages, in which
proprietary software may be unavailable. Again, this would be both using
FLOSS, and contributing to the development of the code. 

Even proposing a pilot project of this kind would demand surveying Finnish
programmes and projects from ICT perspectives generally, and from the
perspective of the present study in particular. We do not know whether any
survey of this kind has been done or initiated in the MFA. However, we
recommend a pilot survey to this effect to be undertaken, including a
specific component looking into FLOSS alternatives.

The Finnish government's February 2001 decision-in-principle on
"Operationalisation of Development Policy Objectives in Finland's
International Development Co-operation" states that "in order to better
harness the potential of civil society, new ways of development cooperation
will be developed in cooperation with non-governmental organisations".
Combining this decision with both the technical and societal potentials of
FLOSS as a movement would open perhaps the most promising prospects for
Finnish contributions in this field. There are at least four angles from
which to start exploring the field.

There is a need for further research and surveying of the ground realities
concerning ICT, especially FLOSS projects and the experiences of local Civil
Society organisations in a more limited selection of partner countries. As
shown in the field research reports of this survey (and Chapter 5.4), it
turned out that any thorough field work would demand much more
time-consuming legwork than what was able to be done within the frameworkof
this overall survey. 
There is a need of sensitizing Civil Society organisations in our partner
countries to the potentials of ICTs in general and FLOSS in particular, both
in their own work and in the empowerment of the Civil Society. Access to and
publishing on the Internet with a local content in the local language, and
local job creation are only a few of the opportunities here. 
There is a need of training of the motivated NGOs and other Civil Society
organisations in the basics of computing and FLOSS. This training should
combine both technical ICT/FLOSS and community empowerment aspects. There
could be a combination of local training programmes, and an international
training course for the key persons and local trainers, arranged in
collaboration with, for example, the Linux Institute of the University of
Helsinki, which is to be founded in spring 2003. 

There is a need of community building. The locally trained "grassroots
hackers" should be or become natural members of both their local communities
and Civil Society organisations as well as the worldwide Free (Libre) and
Open Source Software movements, "hacker communities", through the training
process, their natural contacts and support networks, and the existing
hacker networks, e.g. Linux users groups. 

Our recommendation is that all these aspects will be given a further look,
from the basis given by this ground-breaking research survey. The producers
of this report, OneWorld Finland and KEPA, together with their partners and
international networks, would be willing to participate in developing
further these ideas into more precise pilot projects in the future.

Conferences and Seminars Attended:

"Information Society LIBRARY or SUPERMARKET" June 2002, St. Petersburg,
Russia. Organized by Attac Finland264 together with The Globalization
Institute (Moscow) and Computerra.265 

Conference on The New Economy in Development266 May 2002, Helsinki, Finland.

Organized by the UNU's World Institute for Development Economics Research -
WIDER 267

World Forum on Community Networking 268 2002, Montreal, Canada.

Open Source and E-Governance269 October 16-18, Washington, DC. Organized by
infoDev,270 the Cyberspace Policy Institute of The George Washington
University - CSPRI,271 and the UNDP. 

Lep pozdrav,
Ales