- Byron Clark
from The Spark October 2007
The commercial software industry has long been propped up governments. It’s a little-known fact that Microsoft’s biggest customer is the United States government. In addition, the state in many countries has supported the industry though patent legislation.
Opposing software patents in Europe is one of the biggest campaigns the Free Software Foundation has done recently. While left-leaning central and local governments have begun to experiment with free software alternatives in places such as Latin America (see The Spark January 2007), here in New Zealand local government is still into proprietary software. As well as filtering public money into the private sector, this is locking out people who use free software at home.
In a media release promoting Software Freedom day, organiser Rik Tindall highlighted the issue of the Canterbury public transport website.
“A good example of the service neglect FOSS [Free & Open Source Software] users suffer is to be found locally, at Environment Canterbury.” he said. “The online Metro Real Time Bus Info is not readable without MS Explorer. This means bus stop numbers cannot be extracted and therefore the bus locations can remain hidden to FOSS users, without their going to view the stops.”
Tindall says the situation is improving, citing the Government Web Standards and Recommendations of March 2007, which require Crown and public agencies to adhere to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiatives from 1 January 2008. The FOSS user community is eager for inclusion via information presentation standards and browser compatibility.
Problems may still lie ahead for users of free software, however. An item in a list of “trade barriers” to a US-NZ free trade agreement, highlighted by bloggers Joe Hendren and No Right Turn, states that “the US music industry opposes a proposed amendment to the New Zealand Copyright Act that would legalise the duplication of sound recordings in other formats for a purchaser’s private use”. This amendment was one of the few positives in a copyright Act that was largely in line with the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (see The Spark, February 2007).
In addition to Software Freedom Day held last month, World Standards Day, an international day to raise awareness of the importance of international technology standardisation, is being held on 14 October. New Zealand participation is expected.
