[en] Objectives for Free Software Foundation Latin America

[Fernanda Giroleti Weiden]

Objectives for Free Software Foundation Latin America 

Just like its sister organisations, Free Software Foundation Latin
America's (FSFLA) main goal will be to promote and defend the freedoms
and rights of software users and developers, specifically the freedom to
write, use, redistribute and modify all the software they use.

FSFLA will foster the participation of regional actors in the global
context, in order to help safeguard Free Software's legal and
philosophical framework. It will act in joint concert with the other
FSFs (Free Software Foundations) to promote and defend Free Software, as
well as to follow and influence public policies related to it.

Towards those ends, FSFLA will:

1. Spread and promote Free Software as a concept, according to the FSF's
definition put forward in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.es.html

2. Participate and influence public policy decision-making processes
that concern Free Software, so that they will reach conclusions that
support Free Software's philosophy and principles.

3. Defend the rights of Free Software users and developers, offering
education and legal support regarding use, development, distribution and
defence of Free Software, and especially software distributed under the
FSF's own licences.

4. Help all kinds of endeavours, public or private, whether
entrepreneurial, cooperative, individual or collective, which seek to
consolidate new business or operating models based on Free Software.

5. Foster Latin American developers' active participation in the
development, improvement and adaptation of Free Software programs. 

6. Dialogue with governments in the region to encourage them to adopt
Free Software as a matter of public policy, and to help them give this
policy an appropriate legal framing.

7. Encourage educational institutions to use exclusively Free Software
in all instances in which pupils are expected to use computers.

Rationales:

1. In order to understand Free Software's importance to society, users
and developers need to have broad knowledge of the meaning and
consequences of software's legal aspects. Thus, disseminating this
knowledge among people contributes to the main objective of getting ever
more people to use, develop and redistribute Free Software.

2. At all levels of regulation, from technical through legal measures,
from local to global forums, decisions are being made that concern
people's rights in the digital age, in particular the freedom to write,
use and share free programs. These regulations range from the deployment
of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) to the practices of many
government agencies that require the use of proprietary software in
order to interact with them electronically. From negotiations on the
patentability of software ideas to the legitimacy of computer programs
that can decode certain data formats, the freedom to write and
distribute free programs is in jeopardy. The defence of the rights of
users and developers would be woefully incomplete without a serious
engagement in these issues.

3. Free licenses, specially GPL (GNU General Public License) and LGPL
(GNU Lesser General Public License, are frequently the target of attacks
all over the world. These attacks mostly come in the form of
misinformation that aims at creating fear and doubt about their
applicability. Users and developers will benefit from FSFLA's work
diluting fears, clearing doubts, strengthening and giving legal backing
to the licensing model which forms the foundations upon which the
community rests.

4. For users and developers to keep their freedom in the long term, it
is important that Free Software continues to demonstrate that it is a
sustainable model for a community of software users. Thus, supporting
the search for sustainability models is a significant contribution to
the freedom of users and developers.

5. The vision put forth by the proprietary model is that software is an
industrial product that is bought in its final form, and is to be used
only as the developer made it. In contrast to this image, FSFLA will
promote the participation of Latin American developers in Free Software
projects to practically demonstrate the philosophy that software is a
cultural technique, which must be free for anyone to learn and practise.
When people see more of their own neighbours taking part in Free
Software projects, it will become easier for them to understand that we
are all invited to participate in its development, whether directly by
writing code, or indirectly by asking or paying others to do so. This
change of attitude, from passive users to co-responsibles for the
development and maintenance of free programs, enables users to better
understand the virtues of Free Software's social system. The
participation of Latin American programmers in the development of Free
Software projects will result in more Free Software for everyone, and is
the preferred means for Latin Americans to exercise the skills needed to
write, improve and adapt the software we use.

6. When governments use software, they do so in order to process, store
and transmit data that belongs to the citizens, on whose behalf they are
acting. Each time a government forfeits its freedom, it does so in the
name of its citizens, thus betraying their trust, and denigrating with
its example the value of freedom and independence. When it uses non-free
software to process sensitive data its citizens are required by law to
provide, the public administration puts the security and persistence of
the data at jeopardy, as well as its own sovereignty. The natural
counterpart to the citizen's obligation to provide the data is the
commitment on the part of the government to submit the processing of
this data to the same level of transparency and public scrutiny as the
rest of its governance acts. This can only be achieved with Free
Software. Encouraging governments to adopt policies based on Free
Software is a way to promote independence, freedom and transparency in
the public administration. 

7. Education should not be exclusively about facts, but also about
values. When educational institutions use non-free software, they are
communicating antisocial values: the idea that software must not be
shared, that there is knowledge that belongs to others, which we don't
have the right to learn, only to "consume". Those to which this message
is conveyed will stand little chance to enjoy and defend rights they are
unaware of having. FSFLA must thus promote an educational model based on
software as a cultural technique and in the principles of freedom and
cooperation, essential values of the Free Software philosophy.