On 06/21/2018 02:33 PM, Erik Albers wrote:
- How can we oppose the argument that publicly financed software released as
Free Software is anticompetitive? '
From a Danish perspective, the notion of free software as anticompetitive is completely ridiculous. The Danish public IT infrastructure is completely dominated by two HUGE American-owned companies, KMD (once owned jointly by the municipalities, now sold off to Advent International) and CSC (now DXC Technology).
They oversee non-interoperable monolithic systems, many based on a legacy infrastructure dating back to 80s mainframe programs, which are of course proprietary - all interaction with these companies cost the municipalities and the government huge amount of money, but on the bright side they are tied hand and foot to these vendors - until very recently, these companies were practically speaking the only owners of public data in Denmark (not even joking - through the CPR system, KMD for years charged the municipalities about € 0.33 per pop for accessing *their own* citizen records - which created a use case for my company's free software product "CPR Broker" which caches these records. The rest of the market is owned by a few other big players, Microsoft Windows on all desktops and nearly all servers, Microsoft AD for identity management and ADFS for federation, and a few other large proprietary vendors such as SD Løn for salaries processing.
The reality is that within this ecosystem there's *no* real competition, there's only monopolies and complete lock-in ("oh you want us to integrate to vendor X, even though we can provide product Y at double the price. Yes, we can do that - just wait one moment while I calculate the price ... oh, pity! Looks like you're not going to be saving any money.")
In the case of free software, "open source" as they consistently call it, the public authorities order what they get from an independent vendor and are at any point free to take the code and go to another vendor.
And there is, in fact, a small but burgeoning sector of free software vendors, some more commited than others, but delivering e.g. through the OS2 collaboration which I mentioned in a previous mail: https://os2.eu/node/332
Between these vendors there's real competition, as we can in fact can and do sell each other's products. And by introducing open standards and co-funding, we're in fact very slowly getting into the creation of free and municipality-funded competitors to the monoliths. But that this should be *impeding* or preventing competition is risible - as I said, this very new development is *introducing* competition where previously there was none.
- 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)
I think I covered that in the above.
- 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)?
Open standards; loosely couple integrations, i.e. in an infrastructure with N systems you don't have to make N*(N-1) integrations between proprietary systems, you can make N integrations to open standards and find a common way for them to communicate.
In fact, the Danish association of municipalities (KL) formulated such a protocol, based on AMQP and the Danish OIO standards for public data, and called it MOX and later commissioned my company to make a POC for it - speaking of deployments we're just getting started, but the system can be seen here: https://github.com/magenta-aps/mox/
Best Carsten
Disclosure: I'm working for a company which is dedicated to creating free software and currently serving the Danish public sector and thus not without interest in this question.
- Are there more examples in Europe in that - like in Switzerland - national
courts decided in favor of publishing publicly financed software as Free Software?
Looking forward to your input
Best regards, Erik