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A copyright known as
Copyleft
By Linus Atarah
A
developing world up against the copyright protected
software of Bill Gates can turn to Copyleft, delegates
said at a recent seminar in Helsinki, Finland. Copyleft,
or general public licensing, is the licensing system
developed by a free software movement to protect the
rights of software users, as copyright laws protect the
software owners.
Free? Free as in "free speech"
and not as in "free beer", researchers pointed out at
the meeting, which was sponsored by a Finnish coalition
of non-governmental organizations and Oneworld, an
Internet portal. The software freedom fighters say that
distributors and developers of the free software will
still have a right to sell their product, but the source
code of the software must be revealed to allow users to
study and modify it.
The meeting brought
together researchers from India, Brazil, Pakistan and
South Africa.
The free software, Linux, was
developed after Richard Stallman, a former software
engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
the US launched the Free Software Movement
in 1985. Linus Torvalds developed an open source varient
of the UNIX operating system, aptly named the 'Linux' operating system. The
Linux system has now become a major counter to
Microsoft, whose profits come mainly from propriety
software.
"Mathematical things can't be
patented," Stallman argued. "Surely nobody could apply
mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee
whenever one had to use the Pythagoras theorem." A group
of software developers began subsequently to write
software and give away its source code. This means that
while the source code for Microsoft Windows is a closely
guarded secret, the source code for Linux is freely
available for a user to modify.
Here are
some of the results that delegates at the Helsinki
meeting pointed to:
The chief minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh in
India, Digvijay Singh, has announced that the state
government would switch to Linux software. "For us it is
not a question of Microsoft versus Linux," he said. "It
is just a matter of choosing between free software and
monopoly software."
A Canadian Dan Dinicolo teamed up with local
computer engineers in Ghana in Africa using the Linux
system to provide low-cost wireless access solutions for
small businesses, corporations and individual users. It
is also helping with rural communication because it can
be used where there is no electricity or other
communication system.
The University of Zululand in South Africa is making
substantial savings as it uses the alternative system to
provide inexpensive Internet access to 6,000 students.
In India, a speech synthesizer is being developed
for people challenged by computer interface.
The
digital divide is being bridged in all such cases by
means that expensive propriety software could not have
allowed, delegates pointed out. "If it wasn't for
free/libre open source software, Internet in South
Africa would have been delayed by two years," Nico
Coetzee, Linux programmer with the National Investment
Bank in South Africa, said at the meeting. "Open source
software is ready today to be deployed in basically
every area imaginable," said Coetzee. "There are no
restrictions on distribution, and a single CD can be
used in a large geographical area."
The trend
has "significant implications for international
organizations working in fields like education,
communication and information," said Frederick Noronha,
an Indian journalist and activist with the US-based Free
Software Foundation. "It holds considerable promise for
Third World countries looking for affordable and
sustainable technology to leapfrog out of the trap of
poverty and illiteracy, and the many problems that
accompany it."
It is also a trend that has
Microsoft chief Bill Gates on the run. Gates visited
India two weeks back to convince Indian software
developers that patented software could help solve their
development needs.
The free software is
accessible also to big corporations such as IBM and
Hewlett-Packard. Both have made use of the free software
while also contributing to its expansion and
development, researchers said. IBM was among the users
of the Apache system built with free software that
hosted more than half of Internet servers around the
world, said Professor Tere Vaden from the Hypermedia
Laboratory at the University of Tampere in Finland.
Many of
these companies wanted to step away from dependence on
Microsoft, Vaden said. "IBM needs to sell hardware, not
software, and the proliferation of good software is in
their interest," he said. The software can be downloaded
from www.gnu.org
and users are invited
to make a donation. Free software could sometimes
perform better than Microsoft, Vaden said. For instance,
users are turning increasingly to Mozilla, a free
Internet explorer which many find more stable than
Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Delegates spoke of
some fears that the US may informally pressure
developing countries against adopting free software in
return for grants or concessional trade access. Civil
society will have a major role to play in raising
awareness of the enormous potential of the free software
movement, delegates said.
Already, users of the
free software have overcome a major sticking issue
before the World Trade Organization (WTO). The
trade-related intellectual property regime of the WTO
had denied them easy access to propriety software. Vaden
says this software could now be developed by users to
develop technology for their needs without having to ask
any "owners". The ultimate aim of the free software
family was to make propriety software obsolete.
(Inter Press Service)
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