Draft of FOSS bill

THE office of Rep. Teddy Casiño sent me a copy of the draft Free/Open Source Software Bill. The bill’s long title: “An act defining the procurement of software and software licenses in government agencies, promoting the development, and use of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS), declaring illegal the patenting of known FOSS and standards or any of their derivatives thereby amending section 22 of RA 8293 otherwise known as the intellectual property code of the Philippines, and for other purposes.” Phew! The bill will be filed on Sept. 12, so if anyone has comments or suggestions, you can post them here and I’ll pass them along. You can read the document here.

I believe there should be a provision on the FOSS bill about government documents: they should, in the future, all be posted in a format documented with an open standard. They already do this by posting republic acts and other government documents as PDFs, but I think it would still be a good idea to enshrine that into law.

Oh yes, this would make a good addition to the open source bill. However, I feel it might be redundant as this bill forces the use of open standards already. I guess the “open standards rule” applies to government documents too (over an above network protocols).

Btw, my comments can be found in my blog:
http://hip2b2.yutivo.org/2006/09/07/philippine-open-source-bill-in-the-works/

Good luck!

PDFs are not open, but are currently undergoing standardization.

Section 8 seems to clash with software currently under GPL2 and upcoming ones on GPL3 when modified by the government. It seems to fit well on software under the Public Domain and some BSD licenses.

Overall, its a good draft that blends well with the issues of intellectual property and open standards.

There should also be emphasis on the standardization of free/open file formats for government use so that proprietary software companies can come to play the ballgame as well.

> PDFs are not open, but are currently undergoing standardization.

It might still be in development, but it is already published as open by the International Standards Organization.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000125.shtml

In particular, this is subtype PDF/A, PDF for Preservation, based on PDF Reference Version 1.4.

Since it’s an open standard, PDF/A is used on other governments who prefer free/open source, like the Extremadura Regional Government in Spain who will be using PDF/A together with ODF in dealing with government documents (http://lwn.net/Articles/193402/).

PDF/A is also close to what OpenOffice exports to when you save a document to PDF, give or take a few features (http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=169314).

My comments are at http://www.technopinoy.com/?p=213.  Good start but too restrictive.  It forces FOSS onto schools and government when it should aim to put FOSS on equal footing as that of proprietary software.

Programming language - any program to interpret machine codes into human readable text format used by programmers to form a program.

This definition needs to be revised for accuracy.  A programming language is not a program that interprets machine codes-- it is an artificial language-- a tool for expressing instructions to a computer.