Contrary to being an anti-free market the Bill is promoting the knowledge to educators and students on what constitute open standards. Therefore, when these new students become IT providers they are to know first hand how to implement a system that complies to “Open Standards”.

Therefore, it is with the objectivity that we should look at the FOSS Bill and, as FOSS have proven, it does not cripple the IT industry but encourage local innovators.

The current software acquisition environment for the government is NOT a level playing field. Proprietary vendors are able to leverage the current dominance of proprietary platforms to sell even more proprietary software. They also encourage fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about FOSS by claiming FOSS will either not be able to match proprietary software features, or by exaggerating the effort required to move to FOSS. The ignorance of many in government about FOSS also plays into the greedy hands of these FUD-mongering proprietary software peddlers.

The bottom line is that FOSS needs a little help, and that is what this bill does.

The bill mandates a preference for software that gives certain freedoms to users and developers (this is the result of the different FOSS licenses). It does not favor any technology, platform, vendor, or any source of software. It does favor the FREEDOMS given by the FOSS licenses, and there’s no reason why this should not be the case. It is just a good a standard for evaluating software as any other standard.

The Philippines stands to benefit from the FOSS bill. Congress should pass it ASAP!!!

The filing of House Bill 5769, the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006, sponsored by Bayan Muna Representative Teodoro Casiño fueled once again the raging debate on the use of proprietary software versus open source systems. The Bill follows …