A year ago I wrote an article on a bill for Uruguayan state organizations to give preference to free software and open formats, a complaint presented by the Uruguayan Chamber of Information Technologies and an outline of a response to that complaint.
A couple of days ago and without fanfare or cymbals, because they were saving them to celebrate legal and regulated cannabis, the senate slightly modified the law and now it will pass to deputies. If deputies approve it, the law is finally approved. Yes now.
And what changes did they make? First I pass what the project in its original version. The most important changes are with respect to this part of Article 2.
In the event that proprietary software is chosen, the reason must be based on technical aspects that cannot be solved with free software. In the event that the State contracts or develops software, it will be licensed as free software, including access as free software to the program or programs necessary for development.
That piece, as you read it ……. sounds pretty extreme. Provokes shaking chills between heaps of application developers who usually develop them in Windows. Remember, it is not about the state completely migrating to Linux as in Munich, but about free software and open formats, little by little, taking more ground. So these changes were made:
1) What to base the choice of proprietary software only with technical reasons not going. Now the foundation does not have to be technical.
2) That the software contracted or developed becomes free, only run if it's going to be distributed.
3) The access as free software to the programs necessary for development, it doesn't go either. In other words, free software can be created with the visual studio.
My opinion …… .. point 2 does not concern me, although it shows some misunderstanding. Software can be free but used privately.
With point 1, you have to think carefully about what software they can allow for reasons other than technical ……… let's see ………. According to article 1, the documents must be in at least an open format, therefore MS Office does not zafa …………Skype can get away. I don't know if they use it there but it can get away, unless they find out that Pigdin and Jitsi exist for Windows ………………… If the DGI reacts and redo your forms web making them compatible with Firefox, it does not undo Internet Explorer either. If you convert your excel forms to .ods and rewrite your macros to Libreoffice Basic, even better ……… and the rest must be private software.
And with point 3 ……… ..this touches me personally. I gave you Visual Studio as an example, but I don't know if you've ever heard of Genus. Genexus is a development tool created in Uruguay (no or no), which creates business applications for Windows, Web and Android. Its appeal is the use of automatic code generators that allow generating the program code in various languages (Java, C ++, Cobol, .NET, Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, Ruby, etc.) and a database normalization module that (applying incremental development) automatically creates and maintains the databases of the created program (supports SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle). Programming there is too intuitive that it can even scare developers of other languages. Of course, it is a proprietary tool, very expensive, only available for Windows and I do not recommend it for personal development.
I tell you this because my job is to develop with Genexus. My company has a super management system made in Genexus, there are several clients who use it and I take care of maintaining it, correcting it, adapting it, etc. If I could show you a piece of code generated by genexus, they wouldn't understand a damn. There are routines that you don't know where they came from, variables that you can't distinguish… ..all an autogenerated chaos from a few lines of code and some forms. If the generated code could be released, they would go crazy trying to understand it. The FSF realized this (very) late (BEWARE, the part that the software must be developed in a 100% free environment is not true. The bill does not say that.)
Same. It is progress. Who wants brownies?
http://cesol.org.uy/contenido/comunicado-cesol-ante-aprobacion-ley-sl-estado-uruguayo
"In the event that proprietary software is chosen, the reason must be based on technical aspects that cannot be solved with free software."
From what I understand the rule would be the use of free software and the exception, the proprietary one based on technical aspects, does not seem to be able to deviate from the technical foundation
In administrative matters, a good practice is that the official, to make a decision, requires previously requesting non-binding technical reports, and if the official's decision deviates from the reports, it must have a justification, because otherwise it would be a case of arbitrariness ,
Yes, in truth it would be that the foundation no longer has to be based on technical aspects that cannot be solved with free software. What happens is that it is very long.
There is no point in developing Free Software, in a non-free environment, because it deprives the freedom of not having to pay for a license to compile the software code.
This does not make sense in any way, also if you are migrating to free alternatives, what sense would it make to develop an application in Visual Studio?
Greetings.
Tell those who develop Windows versions of the GNU tools. There is also free software that is only available on windows (such as VirtualDub and Notepad ++)
QT SDK + GNU Emacs = Awe.
Also, I'll be getting the second part of Free apps that you won't believe are on Windows.
Alternatives for Visual Studio… Mono? Maybe
I better start using GNU Emacs with the QT SDK. Case closed.
Very good article, I also work with genexus here in Uruguay and personally I have the same point of view on certain things, as you do. As for those points that you put, I see them the same, some very well closed haha, but that is political and personally, everyone has their point of view. Very good article, you would have put the video of the drugstore with the brownies hahaha. I like more to hear about Uruguayans than Genexus.
Greetings!.
I remember those days working with GX version 9 with visual fox pro, it was entertaining to develop applications but as you say the code was unreadable to human eyes. Cheers
I don't know, but I've been making my programs by hand for a long time, and I'm learning how to use the QT SDK with GNU Emacs to design such applications, mainly for Windows (Visual Studio is too heavy).
And by the way, in Peru, progress is already being made as far as that matter is concerned (to beg that they pay interest to that bill).
Well, the thing about these laws is that, at least in my country (Venezuela) they are quite smoky.
I do not know how this is treated in Uruguay, but if something I learned from these Latin American populist governments is that they really use free software as a simple banner of «technological sovereignty», when we know that it is a myth, the above mentioned technological sovereignty does not exist nobody, nobody supplies 100% their technological needs in a self-sufficient way.
Among other things, I do not see too clear the bill, or the law itself. Here the first presidential decree in this regard gave the possibility of choosing between private or free, which was obviously a loophole and everyone opted for Windows.
Then they changed it to "necessarily Canaima in public institutions." But even so, you continue to see that there are problems and migrations, years after the decree was repaired, have not materialized.
Sometimes I think that these laws tend to want to be too complicated and to please everyone and the truth is that the perfect example for me was in Germany, they went to hell with no middle ground.
Demagoguery, demagoguery everywhere.
Most likely, free software in Peru will have the same fate, but it would surely have another course since Peru signed the Trans-Pacific Agreement (TPPA), and with pressure from US politicians, they will have no choice but to use software free and pay Red Hat Inc.
Hi… I want brownies!
good article!