From:	 TonStanco@aol.com
To:	 lwn@lwn.net, TonStanco@aol.com
Subject: Re: My World Bank Presentation Re Developing countries & Open Source/Free Sof...
Date:	 Mon, 14 Jan 2002 16:32:47 EST

On December 6, 2001, Tony Stanco, Senior Policy Analyst at the Cyberspace
Policy Institute of The George Washington University delivered the following
presentation to the World Bank's InfoDev Annual Meeting in Washington D.C.
This speech is part of an initiative by the Free Software Foundation and The
FreeDevelopers Network (TM) to help create a software industry in every
country. Only Free Software allows each country to have its own software
industry on an equal footing with everyone else, because it requires everyone
to share the same source code base. Also, a fully functional software
industry represents the best way for developing countries to join the world
economy, because it doesn't require large, expensive plants, as do most other
major industries.

_______________

WORLD BANK: INFODEV PRESENTATION 
(December 6, 2001)
By Tony Stanco


I would like to thank InfoDev for inviting me to speak about Open Source/Free
Software. I am a Senior Policy Analyst at The George Washington University's
Cyberspace Policy Institute, where I advocate Open Source/Free Software to
governments and universities around the world. I am also the founder of The
FreeDevelopers Network. I have been asked to talk today to this august group
about Open Source/Free Software and how it can help poor and developing
countries create their own IT infrastructures. 

SOFTWARE AS IMPORTANT GLOBAL INDUSTRY

Software is critically important to the new high-tech world we are entering.
It is the cyber nerve system of information technology, and has a
disproportionate economic impact on this new world. It is no coincidence that
software has created some of the world's richest companies. In fact, at one
time Microsoft was capitalized at over $500 billion. That was more value in
one company than at any other time in history, and it was all built on
software.

Software can be such a high value product, because it has few requirements
for expensive physical assets in its production. This allows for gross
margins upwards of 85% -- higher than any traditional plant-based industry.
Therefore, software development provides a unique opportunity for developing
countries that missed out on the physical infrastructure build-out of the
last century to leap frog into this century and make up for lost time. 

Software development should be seen as a strategic issue for the World Bank
and national governments, because its creation depends on major investments
in people, not major investments in plants. And one resource that developing
countries have is lots of people. As a result, if some of those people can be
educated to create software, those countries can tap into the world economy
rather quickly.

I also want to point out that software development can be taught relatively
easily. It is something that 14 year-olds are relatively good at, and
generally they like to do it, too. Let's not forget that Bill Gates started
programming at about that age, and some people think he has done pretty well
(though others have issues with how it was done). There was a point at the
height of the market when Bill Gates could have given $10 to every man, woman
and child in the world and still have $40 billion left over.

So it is clear that software development is a very important economic
activity. But why is Open Source/Free Software important?

OPEN SOURCE/FREE SOFTWARE

It may surprise some of you that Open Source/Free Software is not just about
developing great software. It is also an international social movement that
touches on the fundamental human rights of freedom and democracy. 

Professor Lessig and others say that software in the high-tech world is the
functional equivalent of law. They argue that computers are quickly becoming
a cyberpolice force that mimics traditional law enforcement. (And the recent
Microsoft antitrust trial has left it already ambiguous whether national
governments will regulate Microsoft, or Microsoft will regulate national
governments.)

The power of software is ubiquitous and inherent in this new digital age,
because software and computers are starting to control the way people
interact with each other, with business and with their governments. Think of
what computer voting will be like and how e-government is already being
defined by the contours of software. In cyberspace, these transactions and
relationships are dictated by the lines of software code, just as traditional
law defines their contours in real space.

The first concern of Free Software is, therefore, the potential impact of
software on freedom and democracy if these fundamental rights in cyberspace
are left to a few white businessmen in America. This is not what the media
have reported about the Movement. They have reported that Free Software is
about superior software development, but that is only part of the story. The
whole social movement aspect is currently under-reported, but is nonetheless
extremely important. 

SOME OPEN SOURCE/FREE SOFTWARE FACTS

For those of you who don't know of the successes of Open Source/Free
Software, here are some facts.

Merrill Lynch, in an In-Depth Report on October 30, 2001, called Open
Source/Free Software a "disruptive innovation" that has the potential to
topple the traditional software business model, including that of the
industry heavyweight, Microsoft. 

The same report also said that GNU/Linux has a replacement cost estimated at
over $1 billion using conventional measurements. This is an amazing figure,
given that the Open Source/Free Software Community created GNU/Linux in their
spare time, without a traditional corporate hierarchy or organization, and
without relying on traditional intellectual property laws that some companies
claim are absolutely necessary for the development of professional software.

Some of you may have read that Microsoft called Open Source/Free Software a
cancer, a destroyer of intellectual property, and anti-American. At the
beginning of this year, the company really went after Open Source/Free
Software. Of course, all this backfired, because, with Microsoft complaining
so loudly about the threat, even skeptics naturally started to think that
there was something to it after all. Otherwise, why would the world's most
successful software company, with $35 billion in the bank and 3 separate
monopolies be concerned about a bunch of volunteers? And in the end, even
Steve Ballmer was forced to concede that Linux was "Threat number one."

The Open Source/Free Software Community has grown to about 300,000 developers
in over 70 countries. These 300,000 people are currently working on about
30,000 software projects, and most of these were started in the last couple
of years.

According to the European Commission's Study into the Use of Open Source
Software in the Public Sector, released in June 2001, from December 2000 to
June 2001, the number of Open Source/Free Software projects doubled. This
fact alone should suggest that the future is very bright indeed for this
important Movement.

SECURITY AND FREE SOFTWARE

Another important fact to know about Free Software in these days after
September 11th is its superior security.

The U.S. National Security Agency likes GNU/Linux so much that it is
promoting its own Security Enhanced SELinux, which it would like to see as
the platform for the country's critical IT infrastructure in e-government and
e-commerce.

The NSA thinks that Free Software can be more secure than traditional,
proprietary software, because you can't hide back doors in code when everyone
can inspect it. 

The Cyberspace Policy Institute at George Washington University, the Free
Software Foundation and The FreeDevelopers Network are working with the NSA
to help make SELinux a secure e-government/e-commerce platform for use around
the world.

HOW IS THE MOVEMENT DOING GLOBALLY?

Many countries are looking to Open Source/Free Software as a way to develop
their own home-grown software industry. Some are doing it for national pride.
Others for reasons of national security. Still others, just because they
don't like paying the Microsoft software tax. This group includes China,
France, Brazil, Japan, Germany, and India, among many others.

As an example of this trend, this past July Richard Stallman and I
inaugurated the Free Software Foundation-India and FreeDevelopers-India in
Trivandrum, Kerela. This initiative was sponsored by the public, private, and
academic sectors there, with Kerela's Ministry of Information Technology, the
Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, and TechnoPark,
all involved.

Why did Kerela look to Open Source/Free Software? Kerela is one of the
poorest states in India, but one with a high literacy rate. Some enlightened
politicians and developers there realized that India has one of the largest
software developer communities in the world, but that it does not share the
wealth produced by the world's software in a fair way.

In looking at the issue, they believed that the problem is not that Indian
developers are not as good as American developers, but that traditional
proprietary software companies exploit the developers in India by paying them
less, and that these companies sometimes require the best and brightest to
leave India and work elsewhere. They further believe that Indian developers
were treated as second-class software citizens, because they didn't have the
right to study and analyze the code as did some developers in other
countries, thus giving their competitors an unfair advantage. As a result,
the forward-thinking people in Kerela adopted Open Source/Free Software for
some e-education and e-government projects.

Open Source/Free Software allows India to place its software developers on an
equal footing with American and European developers, so that the products
produced by the Indian developers are the result of their abilities, and not
hindered by restricted access to secret code. It was this ability to educate
future software developers to create their own software industry that
attracted Kerela to Open Source/Free Software.

I believe that Open Source/Free Software can help InfoDev bring other such
innovative IT projects to developing countries, thereby helping them create
their own software industries, so that they, too, can enjoy the fruits of the
world economy in self-sustaining ways.

By the way, we are looking for more Open Source/Free Software participants
and partners, so if you are interested please contact me. Thank You.

Tony Stanco, Esq.
Senior Policy Analyst
Open Source/Free Software and e-Gov
Cyberspace Policy Institute
George Washington University
2033 K Street N.W., Suite 340
Washington, DC 20006
202-994-5513  Fax:202-994-5505
Stanco@seas.gwu.edu
Tony@FreeDevelopers.net
http://www.cpi.seas.gwu.edu