September 15, 2008
I would like to first of all thank everyone for attending the opening ceremonies of the 2nd House of Representatives FOSS Week. I would like to especially thank my staff, especially CJ, Abby and Gerald who have been working on this for the last two months.
Also our friends from the IT department of Congress, the Committee on Information and Communications Technology and the Committee on Trade and Industry, especially their respective chairpersons Representatives Joseph Santiago and Tony Alvarez, who we collaborated with on this endeavor.
Lastly, I thank the participating groups without whose presence this exhibit wouldn’t have pushed through.
Aside from educating members of the House and the congressional staff on what FOSS is and how it can help them in their work, this exhibit is also meant to bring attention to House Bill 1716, or the proposed Philippine FOSS Act, which will be initially deliberated upon by the appropriate committees this Wednesday.
Basically, the bill aims promote the use and development of FOSS by mandating the government to use open standards, open formats, and FOSS in its data storage, communications, documents and ICT goods and services except in situations where such software are not available. It also encourages the private sector to develop a truly Filipino FOSS-based software industry.
But why choose FOSS over traditional, proprietary software? In a nutshell, because FOSS is cheap (in fact, most FOSS are distributed gratis to the public by their own developers and can be freely distributed). It is flexible and development-friendly (FOSS source codes are accessible to consumers who may study, modify and customize the software). It is interoperable (FOSS adhere to open standards and are meant to work across various platforms and protocols). And it is stable and safe (the opening of the source codes and the use of open standards have allowed hundreds of thousands of users around the globe to serve as a virtual research and development team, providing patches and solutions to bugs and glitches in real time over the internet).
Mandating the use of FOSS to government agencies will lower cost of ICT implementations. Rather than spending on software which have FOSS equivalents, additional hardware can be acquired instead. FOSS more importantly, reduces dependence on proprietary technologies which are usually owned by foreign monopolies and carry very restrictive and oppressive license and patent conditionalities. In this way, it will also pave the way for the reduction, if not eradication, of software piracy since by its very nature, FOSS can be modfied, copied and given away for free by its users.
The extensive use of FOSS in government is not an impossible task. In fact, many government agencies or sub-agencies have started migrating their information and data systems, in one way or another, to FOSS and open standards and formats. These include the DOST, NEDA, DTI, NSO, many LGUs, the Supreme Court and of course Congress.
The challenge for Congress, really, is to come up with a policy framework that would lead to the use and development of FOSS. Mandating its use in government is just one step. The more daunting task is to ensure our people’s access to information through technologies that are affordable, democratic and developmental. The use of FOSS, open standards and open formats plays a crucial role in this task of empowering our people. You can not make digital information accessible to the greatest number of people unless the programs that you use to tap such information are, by themselves, accessible and free of unecessary restrictions.
There are many more issues covered by the bill but the biggest hindrance to its approval is lack of information. To be blunt, I’d say that most congressmen do not even know what FOSS is, much less cares whether they use FOSS or proprietary software.
Which brings us to the importance of this exhibit. In order to pass a law on FOSS, members of Congress should first know what it is – this is our mission for the coming week.
Once again, thank you very much for coming and I hope to see you in our various events for this week, especially the committee hearing for HB 1716 this Wednesday.
Maraming salamat po. May the FOSS be with you.###
