On Mon, 28 Aug 2017 14:09:23 +0200 Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
"In a large country with a dynamic software industry, government officials may wish to make it easier for commercial firms to benefit from publicly funded research and development."
Thank you Paul for your very thorough response that covers that entire chain of understanding. Indeed, in this quote, "commercial firms" is understood as "proprietary software firms" as opposed to "free software firms". This confusion that free software would be 'anti-commercial' is at the heart of the power of proprietary solutions over free software in public institutions.
One way to dispel this fallacy is to show that successful commercial venture with free software through valuable examples, e.g.--retaking some that appeared during the last RMLL: GNU Health, that is used in many hospitals in South America and the Carribeans, or the newly founded Synpell (trade unions for free software producers) in France.
By showcasing the existing successes of commercial free software we can easily counter that argument, and expand the meaning of 'commercial firms'. Nevertheless it remains important IMO not to limit this understanding to capitalist trade which is only the tip of the iceberg of the world economy: free software excels where proprietary software ceases to extract profit, in scientific research (e.g., biology, genetics, scientific publications, etc.), in commons practices (e.g., OSM, cagette.net), in hobbyist and education markets (e.g., genealogy, electronics, etc.)...
I'd be really interested if we would start compiling such use-cases and, as Moritz suggested, dispel anti-free-software arguments.
Thank you again for your insight and for rectifying my original intention in the eyes of others on the list.
== hk