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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: Russell McOrmond <russell_-at-_flora.ottawa.on.ca>
To: Free/Open-Source Software Community Networking/Computing <comnet-www_-at-_flora.org>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 12:01:43 -0500 (EST)
I have been annoyed over the years at a number of things that the
Government of Canada does. One has been that they have set inappropriate
barriers to working for/with the government with a number of departments
requiring the use of proprietary tools in order to interact with them.
I believe that the work of the Government should be subject to standards
as well as access to information laws (IE: even to the extent that
software written by the Government should be Open Source in order to
comply with Access to Information laws).
The other has been "International Trade" which has given special rights
to products/services and capital that do not exist for humans. I believe
that Humans should always have superior rights to artificial constructs
(Such as money/products/services), and have felt that our
Immigration/emigration laws are totally incompatible with our
International Trade laws.
It may be time for one of these annoyances to be used against the other.
There is a section of NAFTA that I was made aware of recently which
essentially lays out the requirements for Government Procurement,
specifically a section on Technical Specifications.
http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/nafta-alena/chap10-e.asp
---cut---
Article 1007: Technical Specifications
1. Each Party shall ensure that its entities do
not prepare, adopt or apply any technical
specification with the purpose or the effect of
creating unnecessary obstacles to trade.
2. Each Party shall ensure that any technical
specification prescribed by its entities is,
where appropriate:
(a) specified in terms of performance
criteria rather than design or descriptive
characteristics; and
(b) based on international standards,
national technical regulations, recognized
national standards, or building codes.
3. Each Party shall ensure that the technical
specifications prescribed by its entities do not
require or refer to a particular trademark or
name, patent, design or type, specific origin or
producer or supplier unless there is no
sufficiently precise or intelligible way of
otherwise describing the procurement requirements
and provided that, in such cases, words such as
"or equivalent" are included in the tender
documentation.
4. Each Party shall ensure that its entities do
not seek or accept, in a manner that would have
the effect of precluding competition, advice that
may be used in the preparation or adoption of any
technical specification for a specific
procurement from a person that may have a
commercial interest in that procurement.
---cut---
My reading of this is that if a company that is bidding on a project
using Linux (A POSIX compliant system) is beat out by a company offering
a similar product on Windows NT, and the contract was lost solely based on
the fact that the department is currently an NT shop, then the
POSIX-compliant company can sue the government under NAFTA.
One addition to note is their suggestion that "or equivalent" be a
requirement, which also suggests to me that sole-sourced products such as
Microsoft Products should be disallowed simply because the (deliberate by
vendor) incompatibilities between Microsoft Products and other vendors
products make an "or equivalent" not possible.
On the other hand, a project designed on RedHat Linux can trivially move
to any other distribution of Linux, to the various *BSD systems, or any
other POSIX system that has installed the required features of the
project. This compatibility that exists with operating system has
equivalents for any other system including Network Operating Systems (Use
of CIFS <http://anu.samba.org/cifs/> , Word Processors (XML standards),
and so-on.
I have been witness to a number of times when the government has said
"Ahh, we are a Windows NT shop and your product runs under Linux, so we
can't work with you". I believe that this statement is in essence illegal
under NAFTA, and that we should start to take on the government because of
this.
To compare with the previous Web-server specifications of Industry
Canada which listed almost entirely Solaris running Apache with PHP
enabled, here is the embarrassing notes from the Department of Foreign
Affairs and International Trade, a government department that should have
some idea what NAFTA is:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/hosted?netname=DFAIT-MAECI,198.103.104.0,198.103.104.255
1 www.canadainternational.gc.ca 46 48 48 Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0
2 voyage.dfait-maeci.gc.ca 1 3 1 Solaris Microsoft-IIS/4.0
3 www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca - - - NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0
4 www.exportsource.gc.ca - - - Solaris Apache/1.3.3 (Unix)
5 www.tcm-mec.gc.ca - - - NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0
6 www.iboc.gc.ca - - - NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0
I'd love to see someone sue DFAIT based on non-compliance with NAFTA. The
optics of this in the media would look great!
What are other thoughts on this? It sounds to me like a win-win
situation if we can get the funding to do it. Either we will be getting
rid of Windows NT out of the server rooms of the Government of Canada, or
we will be convincing them to deal with NAFTA. Either way, we win.
The largest barrier to this is the same as with most campaigns against
the government: money.
In a democratic country we would have public legal representation to sue
the government for breaking it's own laws and treaties, but this is North
America where $1==1 vote, so we need to have some money to back our public
participation.
Are there any other OSS, standards-based, etc companies out there
willing to help in this? I know of one company that is following this
path (The one that told me about this section of NAFTA), and I will post
more here about this once that case is going public.
I'm surprised that Corel didn't try to use this in their case against
the Government purchasing Microsoft Word over Wordperfect. MS-Word isn't
available on POSIX compliant platforms, while WordPerfect is and could
fairly easily be ported to other POSIX systems if a large government
department required it.
---
Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://russell.flora.org/work/>
Future FLORA Expansion Ideas <http://www.flora.org/flora.admin.design/>
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