[DMCA-Activists] Why Human Rights Requires Free Software

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from Non Profit Open Source Initiative Discussion
list)

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2002 22:03:08 -0400
From: Paul Hyland <address@hidden>
To: NOSI Discussion List <address@hidden>

Here's an interesting artice from Andy Oram's blog on CPSR's
annual  conference last weekend.  Andy edits Linux and other
books for O'Reilly &  Associates, and also wrote two
articles for the most recent issue of the  CPSR Journal, a
special issue on intellectual property, edited by me.

Patrick makes excellent arguments for open source (or free)
software in the  service of humanity, whether NP, NGO, or
whatever.

Paul Hyland
CPSR Board of Directors
http://home.exit1.com/~paul/
email: address@hidden

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Sunday, October 13, 2002 7:45 PM -0400
From: Robert Guerra <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden, address@hidden


 Published on The O'Reilly Network
(http://www.oreillynet.com/)
 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/11/platform.html
 See this if you're having trouble printing code examples

Why Human Rights Requires Free Software

by Andy Oram
10/11/2002


Human rights is the global currency of modern politics.
Whenever the United States attacks a country, diplomatically
or physically, it cites human rights claims. And by a
not-so-surprising irony, the critics of the United States
and its allies complain of human rights violations as well.

So human rights workers should be universally feted and
supported. Instead, however, they are chronically
underfunded, goaded to justify every detail of their work,
and threatened with dire harm.

For these reasons, human rights work requires free software.

I heard this unusual call for free software (and I think
it's obvious in this context that the proper term to use is
"free" and not "open source") in a speech on October 5th by
Dr. Patrick Ball, the spirited and plain-spoken deputy
director of the Science and Human Rights Project of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Patrick is best known for the eight hours of testimony he
gave before an international criminal tribunal at The Hague
to show that Serbian atrocities, and not NATO bombing or
Kosovo Liberation Army aggression, were responsible for the
mass deaths and displacement of Kosovo Albanians. His
evidence was drawn from a statistical correlation of many
sources, including thousands of interviews made by three
human rights organizations of fleeing Albanians, sometimes
within hours of the killings and destruction they witnessed.

Patrick's venues have ranged from Haiti to Sri Lanka; at his
talk, he discussed recent visits to Guatemala and Sierra
Leone. His gruesome specialty lies in accumulating many
individual stories of death, torture, and terror;
correlating them to determine their degree of consistency
and reliability; and running statistics that show patterns
over time and geography.

One is struck by the incongruity between this horrific
material and Patrick's affable, down-home manner, but his
dedication to ripping away the masks of the world's evil and
vindicating the memories of the victims comes through
clearly. As for his believability, an audience member with a
doctorate in statistics told me later, "This talk was one of
the most compact, yet clearest, presentations that I have
ever heard on what statistics can and cannot do."

There is a good deal of overlap between Patrick's work and
the mission of Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, which has recently started a project called
Privaterra, which provides software support to human rights
workers. The creator of Privaterra, Robert Guerra, knows
Patrick and invited him to speak at the 2002 CPSR annual
meeting. I recently wrote a Weblog on the conference.

So I was familiar with the subject of Patrick's work when he
started his lunchtime keynote, and was too busy stuffing my
face at the start to even bother taking notes. But my
thoughts really started churning when he unexpectedly
started giving accolades to free software. They brought a
new urgency to old debates. Here are his observations.

Accountability and Verification

Human rights workers, who hold powerful forces accountable
for their behavior, need to be accountable themselves for
all of the data and opinions they offer. This accountability
extends to the software they use. And only free software can
meet that requirement.

Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary
encryption program or statistical package to political
activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this;
take my word that it works right." That's a non-starter. If
the software is open source, even though the human rights
staff might not be able to personally verify that it's
accurate and free of bias, they can take the source to a
university or other expert and have it vetted.

The same challenges arise when a human rights organization
publicly presents its results. The politicians, generals,
and other power-holders will dispute every step in
reasoning. A lot of an organization's credibility lies in
its process for collecting data and its use of statistics,
but the software has to be certified to be trustworthy, as
well. An open package whose source can be checked by any
technically qualified person removes a potential area of
dispute.

(As an aside, this consideration shows why it's a good idea
to use free software for any public or governmental
functions -- most of all for elections, where the
reliability of any software solution is questionable in the
first place.)   

Conformance to Scientific Requirements

In addition to the cost of proprietary software, this type
of software presents barriers to adoption, including
cumbersome licensing that often encroaches on the user's
privacy. Scientists have a culture of sharing, which
requires the free and easy exchange of both tools and data.
Free software's lack of licensing and dependence on open
data formats provides the kind of convenience they need.
It's also easy for scientists to try out new tools.

Philosophically, scientists also trust free software more
than proprietary software. Free software represents the
values of community and peer review that scientists depend
on.

On the other hand, Patrick does not anticipate that XML will
make a big difference to the human rights community. This is
because very few traits of their data are standardized,
while the strength of XML lies in its facilitating the
exchange of standardized data. Most of the time, the
individual statistician imposes his or her own structure on
the data gathered, and another statistician who starts
another project will structure the data differently.

Quality

Having systems that don't crash and applications that hold
up under heavy loads are necessities for every scientist,
including a scientist in the human rights field.
Off-the-shelf commercial software, while it may seem stable
enough for home and small business needs, tends to buckle
and break in the face of number-crunching like Patrick's.
Free software gives him the robust environment he needs
without exhausting his budget. Furthermore, systems have to
stay running for human rights workers taking notes in
mountains and rain forests, far from any source of technical
support.

Fitness for Users

Patrick finds the costs of proprietary software offensive.
"It widens the imbalance between the rich and poor regions
of the world," he says. Even worse, "It concentrates power
in the hands of software owners." The organizations that can
afford the tools to collect and process data get to set the
agenda.

One nightmare for movements of the disenfranchised is the
possibility that, under pressure from developed countries
with large copyright holders, repressive nations will pass
harsh laws criminalizing the possession of unlicensed
software. This would be ridiculously hypocritical, of
course, because throughout the developing world, nearly
everybody has unlicensed software -- even governments.

But a crackdown on "software piracy" would give governments
carte blanche to raid any person or organization they don't
like and arrest them for possession of illegal software
copies. It would be hard for Amnesty International to
protest the arrest of human rights workers for copyright
violations, and even harder if those protests came from
governments that had vigorously pushed for the adoption of
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) rules.

The risk cannot be alleviated by donating licenses to human
rights organizations and other nonprofits, because companies
change their licenses regularly. Large and regular infusions
of cash are the only way to stay current with licensing. But
free software eliminates the very root of all of this risk.

Free software is not an ideal solution, not yet. Patrick
appeals to free software developers to make the software
just as easy to use as commercial software. Patrick also
recognizes that urgent social needs can't wait for the whims
of volunteer programmers. (Free software doesn't have to
mean "free as in time.") His organization actually pays
people to develop free software.

"Thank God for Apache," he said, "because it provides so
many tools for us to create easy-to-view interfaces to all
this complex data." Brian Behlendorf, a coordinator of the
Apache project and CPSR member, was present in the audience
and expressed happiness at having played a role in the
project that helped this human rights work. Patrick also
admires MySQL, PostgreSQL, Java (despite a license that is
not formally open), and Python. He welcomed the appearance
of Mozilla, OpenOffice, and Evolution, calling them
"essential pieces" of a free desktop.

Patrick, CPSR, and other attendees at the annual meeting are
expanding their efforts to get help for human rights workers
and other non-governmental organizations in underdeveloped
countries. Too many aid agencies and well-meaning donors
foist technologies on these organizations that are
inappropriate for the physical and social conditions under
which they are working; such technologies include
proprietary software. Computer administrators and
programmers can help by visiting the countries to do
training or by writing software in the comfort of their
offices back at home. You can join a mailing list on these
topics by writing to Warigia Bowman at
address@hidden . You can donate computers to
the World Computer Exchange or help install Linux on them by
contacting Daryl Martyris at
address@hidden .

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates,
specializing in books on Linux and programming. Most
recently, he edited Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of
Disruptive Technologies. oreillynet.com Copyright © 2000
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.


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