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,