The Democracy of FLOSS: Software Procurement Under the Democratic Principle

Abstract

IS IT WRONG TO ALLOW IDEOLOGY to pervade political decisions on software procurement, or is it inevitable that governments profess a particular conception of the good with respect to every aspect of societal life? This article advances a normative framework, based upon a broad conception of the democratic principle, to advocate that Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) be adopted and have its development encouraged and carried out by democratic governments. More than an aspiration, formal and substantial reasons ground the understanding advocated in this article that striving towards comprehensive FLOSS policies is a duty of every state that purports to be a democratic one. After a brief introduction of my propositions in Part 1, and a conceptualization of FLOSS in Part 2, Part 3 describes different governmental FLOSS policies around the world. These policies, I show, are often based upon normative values that, beyond stereotypes, would be better assessed within a thorough conception of the democratic principle. Part 4 portrays the Brazilian government’s particular history of expressly linking FLOSS policies to the democratic principle. Part 5 analyzes different dimensions of the democratic principle in the information age. Part 5 begins by conceptualizing the democratic principle in light of its relation with technology, in general, and FLOSS, in particular, and then evaluates the importance of FLOSS for the fulfillment of cultural, ethical, political, and economic dimensions of the democratic principle. In Part 6, the article concludes with a particular understanding of the commitment assumed in the Tunis round of the World Summit on the Information Society and reinforces this vision of the deontological character of governmental policies towards FLOSS.