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

[Evan Leibovitch]

Scott Elcomb wrote:

>Just curious if anyone out there has an opinion.
>
>I joined the TLUG list back in '04 with the question "What is the status of Open Source in Canada?"
>  
>
Much the same as it is in most countries. Some are worse, some are better.

>Jury's still out on that question, but _there are_ some Countries who take FOSS and related topics seriously.
>  
>
At a governmental level, there are very few countries who actually 
promote open source as public policy. Brazil, Cuba, China and Malaysia 
come to mind.

In most countries the struggle is simply to achieve a balanced playing 
field, to not give any specific advantage to open source but to reduce 
the obstacles of inertia and monopoly power.

There are not many countries with policies continuing to actively favour 
proprietary models; many of these are third-world countries who are the 
recipients -- directly or indirectly -- of software vendor largesse. And 
then there's Ireland, which publicly champions the proprietary-vendor 
case within Europe.

>Amongst those I'd consider "in-tune" are the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, and Britain.
>
I'd say that those are countries in which the level playing field is 
better established, you can add to that Japan and France... but none 
have taken the leap to assert that using open source is good for 
society. I'm also curious to know why you would include Britain, which I 
personally would not have put on an "in-tune"list; I'd put Britain about 
even with Canada on this issue, maybe even a bit behind.

>Gotta include the U.S. - regardless of the U.S. Federal Governments' stance on things, a great number of U.S. citizens (and some States) undertand and support FOSS.
>  
>
You mean the country that gave the world the DMCA, and used politics as 
a lever through WIPO to force similar tactics on the rest of the world? 
Please. Another email thread on this list speaks of the US government 
intervention on behalf of Microsoft at the EU.

>So in the end, where is Canada in the scheme of things?  
>
In Canada, as elsewhere, there is good and bad. Some public 
jurisdictions are very hospitable to open source (Québec, Manitoba), 
some are hostile (Ontario), and some are at various levels of acceptance 
if not support. Industry Canada has gone from opposition to acceptance 
and that job isn't over yet.

Canada has many things to be proud of in the world of open source.

It is the home of OpenBSD, and the Xandros development team. The 
previous owner of Xandros, Corel, was the first company to promote Linux 
through the sponsorship of international sport.

It is the centre of a significant amount of software development, and 
was one of the key countries in producing security related projects such 
as Feeswan (and again, OpenBSD).

One of the first commercial-grade apps for Linux was an accounting 
system by Alberta-based Linux Canada, it's got to be a decade old by now.

Canada is the home of OLS, one of the world's three major Linux 
technical conferences along with LinuxTag and linux.conf.au and the only 
one of its kind in North America.

Long before IBM and HP caught wind, one of the world's first 
publicly-known enterprise early adopters of Linux was Canadian National 
Railways.

Canadian LUGs, co-ordinated by CLUE, organized the world's first 
National Installfest.

Canada is birthplace and stil home of the Linux Professional Institute, 
an internationally-recognized institution bringing together grassroots 
and coroprate support.

In a survey of open source user groups in Canada started for CLUE, I've 
found more than 100 active groups (112 at last count and still growing). 
Given our population that would seem to inducate a fairly active 
grassroots compared to many countries. (To see my work in progress on 
this, see http://old.linux.ca/flexinode/table/1)

At the government level, Canada is the only G7 country not yet to have 
implemented the WIPO edicts on strengthening copyright law to enshrine 
DRM.  The bill C-60 that died with the last parliament, while worse than 
the status quo, was widely regarded as considerably more enlightened 
than the US DMCA or equivalent EU regulations. And even _that_ may be 
improved by the new government: 
http://michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1174&Itemid=85

>How can we do better?
>  
>

There is still much to be done. Silliness such as considering the postal 
code directory proprietary information indicates where the public 
attitude towards the public domain needs more help. And yet even that 
has been identified and is slowly being addressed: 
http://creativecommons.ca/documents/pressrelease.publicdomain_registry.pdf

Still, there are many continuing obstacles as the well-funded content 
and proprietary software industries continue their assault on openness 
and balance between creator and consumer rights. That is one of the 
reasons for the changing focus of CLUE, as that group aligns itself to 
engage in more policy advocacy to deal with that challenge.

- Evan

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