Question for TLUGgers: How can Canada take a leading role in FOSS?

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sun Apr 2 04:55:27 UTC 2006


On 4/1/06, Scott Elcomb <psema4-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> So in the end, where is Canada in the scheme of things?  How can we do
> better?

Canada falls out of a history involving all of the important things in
the economy (entertainingly, beer would be near the top of the list
;-)) being produced by enterprises belonging to a small number of
affluent families.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Compact>

Historical aside: It is interesting to observe that there are only a
couple of names named as afiliated with the Family Compact, typically
Bishop Strachan and John Simcoe.  Doubtless the likes of the Molsons
and Labatts were amongst them.

For all that this supposedly ended in 1838, it's quite interesting
that Canada remains a nation of a goodly number of family
billionaires.  The formal control of the government by the Family
Compact may have ended, but the nation remains one dominated by very
large companies and with remarkably conservative economic attitudes,
local attitudes towards particular political parties aside.

All four federal parties are oriented to a favoring of big, entrenched
businesses, albeit with varying flavours of preference.

None of them, and only a paucity of the country's population, have any
reason to oppose the sorts of things that DRM-heavy companies whether
Microsoft, Sony, or buddies of the movie and recording distribution
apparatuses of the world.

We do have "opposition activists" movements, but they haven't been
oriented to economically-abstract things like "free software," but
rather:
a) Opposition to things American for the purpose of trying to
distinguish us from Americans;
b) Social policies, notably over "human rights" issues surrounding
sexual matters (e.g. - reproductive choices and sexual orientation)

Our governments prefer to sell things, particularly when budgets are tight.

- They have been quite amenable to the desires of DRM-type folk.
- You don't have free access to mapping data, as is the case in the
US; you gotta pay royalties for a license to use it.
- Traditionally, things like software produced by the US government is
implicitly in the public domain; there may be exceptions, but there's
quite a lot of stuff like NETLIB that is "public domain."  There is no
Canadian equivalent to this tradition...
- Databases are commonly considered proprietary, whether that be Stats
Can data or postal code lists, where the US treats that sort of thing
as being more or less "public domain."

I don't think there's any existing large group that could be harnessed
as a natural constitency to oppose the ills that are involved.

Stepping back to the beginning, when names that predate Confederation
like Molson and Labatt are still prominent, and when we have the
ongoing Lord Black issue, I'm not sure there's reason to believe that
the Family Compact ever died off, when families are still there...
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