I’ll be a keynote speaker at el primero congreso de codigo abierto y software libre. There has been discussions, rumors, fears and what-not, that Ecuador could follow the peruvian trend and try to impose FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) for any software used in public institutions.

Personally, I think governments (nor anybody, for that matter) should not try to restrict the software choice because people are much faster (and, collectively, smarter) to adapt (darwinistically) than any government, no matter how modern and light-weight (the european one, for example).

At the same time, I believe that governments and public institutions should protect their (and the people they represent) interests by requiring that the software their services run on will have to meet certain criteria. One of which is to avoid all sorts of lock-in in all possible ways.

While I’m a strong believer in the open way of developing software (which is, in all cases, technically superior to closed-source development), I believe that, today, more than anything, it’s not proprietary software the enemy (unlike what RMS states) but it is, more generally, anything that feels like locking you in.

In fact, I believe that the question goes down to the roots of the very same abstractions: is my concept of freedom the same as yours? can it be generalized and abstracted meaningfully to include all possible ways of perceiving freedom?

The Apache Software Foundation, for example, is composed by people that dislike the copyleft family of licenses because it recursively forces to apply the same licensing terms to all code that includes even small parts of code licensed under those terms. Even if these terms state concepts that the Apache people generally like and respect, the way those terms are applied is perceived as “imposing”, something that makes us uncomfortable because it feels like being locked-in somebody else’s concept of freedom.

At the same time, the Apache Software License (ASL) recursively forces you to avoid using the “Apache” name (or any other apache-specific project name) in software that includes software licensed under these terms. In a sense, as much as the GPL is recursive on code protection, the ASL is recursive on brand protection.

So, while the FSF considers the freedom of code mandatory and branding protection a matter of ethics and good behavior (see, for example, Stallman’s GNU/Linux campaign), the ASF considers branding protection mandatory and freedom of code a matter of ethics and good behavior (and yes, the ASF does campaign for freedom of code).

Now, who is right?

But more than anything, is it the above a meaningful question? Can freedom be so classified and *standardized* by a few and imposed on others? how can I be so pretentious to know that what is good for me is good for you as well? isn’t this another way of painting a platonic ideal view of the world? isn’t this standardization of ideas (the Plato way) what marxism tried to do and failed because it didn’t take into consideration the intrinsically noisy nature of all systems subjected to evolutionistic pressure?

Isn’t the imposition of free software a repetition of the same mistake in a different social realm?

My personal position on this is that, so far, the most long-term stable way (not necessarily the cleanest or more equal) to control a system which exhibists noisy behavior is thru the use of a darwinistic approach.

How this can be applied to lawmaking practices, well, this is yet to be understood, but I’m willing to help because the first world should stop imposing goods, ideologies and concepts on the rest of the world.

Let them develop their own, in an equal, balanced and decentralized (thus uncontrollable!) global information ecosystem.