The Green Party of Canada has become the first Canadian political party to officially support free and open source software in its election platform. The policy has both philosophical and technical motivations.
The Green Party’s policy explains briefly how free and open source software is compatible with Green ideas:
As computer hardware improves, it is important that software programs are readily modifiable by the people who buy and use them.
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Free software gives users the ability to work together enhancing and refining the programs they use. It is a pure public good rather than a private good.
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The Green Party supports the goals and ideals of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and believes that Canada’s competitiveness in global information technology (IT) will be greatly enhanced by strongly supporting FLOSS.
They outline two specific “Green Solutions”:
- Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open standards and encourage and support a nationwide transition to FLOSS in all critical government IT systems. This will make Canada’s IT infrastructure more secure and robust, lower administration and licensing costs and develop IT skills.
- Support the transition to FLOSS throughout the educational system.
Although the Green Party has yet to win a seat in any federal or provincial elections in Canada, they are becoming more and more relevant with support reaching double-digits (in terms of their percentage of the popular vote) in recent years. They are breaking new ground by including free and open source software in their party policy, and although it’s quite unlikely that they’ll be in power anytime soon, they may be able to help raise some support and awareness for the cause. And who knows, maybe one day they’ll make enough noise that they might get the attention of other parties.
The policy is rather simple, but it makes perfect sense. For a government to rely on proprietary software puts its country at the mercy of a (most often foreign) private corporation for its IT needs. By using free and open source software, Canada can have real control over its own IT. Open standards are important for the government as well, since, for example, public documents should be accessible to everyone, not just the users of one particular proprietary operating system. (Just look at the trouble the BBC is having for snubbing non-Windows users – they’re not even government.)
Free software also makes sense for schools, especially secondary and tertiary schools. There’s the fact that it tends to cost a lot less (and is often available at no cost), the enhanced security that it provides, but there’s a very simple reason why free software is a must for academic institutions: you can learn from it. You can’t learn from proprietary software. Not only are you not given the source, but you’re usually legally forbidden to reverse engineer a program to try to discover how it works. Free software on the other hand protects your freedom to study the code to see what a program does, not only for security reasons but also for the purpose of education.
People tend to associate the Green Party with the environment, and while their policies are much wider reaching, environmental issues are still often at the core. And free software is no exception. Free software allows you to make use of older hardware in a way that the forced-upgrade business models of proprietary software developers never will. To run Windows Vista, most people need to buy a new computer. Meanwhile, with GNU/Linux, 10 year old computers are being recycled as workstations and web servers. Recently, the Green Party in the UK joined up with the Free Software Foundation in support for free software to boycott Vista because of the environmental concerns of forced hardware upgrades.
Linux.com also points out that the combination of technical and economic advantages free software provides allows the Greens to stay competitive on a much smaller budget.
There are so many reasons why free software makes sense, and it’s great that the Green Party of Canada has taken the lead on trying to bring the issue into the political arena.
(Now, if only they weren’t completely pro-abortion and anti–Catholic, I might actually consider voting for them. 😛 )
2 thoughts on “Green Party of Canada officially supports free software”
I know this is a rather late comment, but I just wanted to clarify that the Green Party is not anti-Catholic, but Secularist.
While your post applauds the Green party’s initiatives on supporting open source software and open access in our education system, I’m disheartened that at the very end you condemn their support of an education system that is open to believers (or non-believers) of any philosophy, religion, or faith.
Keeping with the idea of an “open”, fair education, secular education aims to be neutral in that sense that it promotes a separation of Church and state, but it is neither anti-theism nor pro-nontheism on an individual level. As quoted by Wikipedia, secularism promotes “the freedom of religion, and freedom from the government imposition of religion upon the people, within a state that is neutral on matters of belief, and gives no state privileges or subsidies to religions.” The funding of Ontario’s Catholic schools has also been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations as highly discriminatory and a violation of our rights to a fair education in Ontario.
Better late than never!
I didn’t get into the whole debate because that’s for another post entirely, and I’m not necessarily in favour of a public Catholic system because of lack of funding for other faiths.
But… a few things.
Of course the Green Party isn’t officially anti-Catholic, that’s obviously an over-generalization. But in any of my experiences with Green Party candidates or supporters, especially in “ultra-secular” (for lack of a better term) arenas (such as talks held by the Uoft Secular Alliance), their hatred for religion – in particular, Catholicism – was overwhelming. For example, comparing Catholics of other religious to people who believe we came from Mars. The utter disgust and contempt for believers was nauseating. Clearly, to me, for most in those camps, it is an issue of freedom from religion much more than it is freedom of religion.
Maybe I’ve been given the wrong impression by a few individuals who don’t represent the ideology as a whole. I doubt it, but I’d be extremely happy if I was wrong.
Lastly, I don’t subscribe to the “open source” camp as much as I subscribe to the “free software” camp, so “open” isn’t a buzzword for me. The word “freedom” carries much strong connotations. I certainly believe there should be a secular public school system first and foremost, but those I heard speak from the Green Party were quite passionately opposed to any sort of tax credits for private religious education, and it seemed as if they only conceding to the possibility of such private schools on the basis that they had to allow for such freedoms in order to maintain.. well, the constitution. Coming from a private religious school, and living in a Jewish neighbourhood where there is demand for faith-based education, I don’t believe the public school system is or should be the only option. Nor do I believe that the “separation of Church and state” and “freedom of religion” should lead to a “freedom from religion” in all public life.
By the way, if I could have found any links to put under “anti-Catholic” of the type of contempt for believers that I witnessed, I certainly would have used those in place of links revolving around the school system issues. I suspect politicians are more careful with their words in front of the media than they are in front of the Secular Alliance.