Greens Push For Open Source In Scotland

Scot­tish Green Party MSP Patrick Harvie has lodged a motion on Open Source in Parliament:

S2M-1921 Patrick Harvie: Open Source and Free Software

That the Par­lia­ment wel­comes the find­ings of the Office of Gov­ern­ment Commerce’s report fol­low­ing proof-​of-​concept trials of Open Source soft­ware; notes that the report con­cludes that Open Source soft­ware is a viable and cred­i­ble alter­na­tive to pro­pri­etary soft­ware and that its use can gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings in hard­ware and soft­ware costs and reduce licens­ing costs and hard­ware refresh require­ments; notes the sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial and envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fit that could arise from a policy of adopt­ing Open Source soft­ware, includ­ing the GNU/Linux oper­at­ing system; notes the long-​term dan­gers for organ­i­sa­tions in becom­ing locked into pro­pri­etary sys­tems; fur­ther believes that the prin­ci­ples of free soft­ware and con­cepts such as Copy­left can help to pro­tect impor­tant rights and free­doms for people in an increas­ingly dig­i­tal age, and urges the Scot­tish Exec­u­tive to develop a strat­egy for pro­mot­ing the adop­tion of free soft­ware and Open Source wher­ever work­able through­out the public sector and to ensure that all soft­ware devel­oped with public funds is copylefted.

Sup­ported by: Shiona Baird, Eleanor Scott, Mark Bal­lard, Chris Bal­lance, Mr Bruce McFee, Robin Harper, Stew­art Steven­son, Mike Pringle, Donald Gorrie

Great stuff. Patrick is also seek­ing com­ments, sug­ges­tions and improve­ments on the motion - I’ll be drop­ping him a line about Cre­ative Com­mons - and asks that folk who sup­port it con­tact their MSP, which you can do via this page.

Thanks to Simon for the heads-​up.

Posted at 6pm on 09/11/04 by Jack Mottram to the linux, politics category.
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