Brief: Barcelona city administration has prepared the roadmap to migrate its existing system from Microsoft and proprietary software to Linux and Open Source software.

Great news from Barcelona. This article was originally posted at ItsFoss.com:

A Spanish newspaper, El País, has reported that the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies.

According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.

Barcelona will go open source by Spring 2019

The City has plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

Migration aims to help local IT talent

For this to be accomplished, the City of Barcelona will start outsourcing IT projects to local small and medium sized enterprises. They will also be taking in 65 new developers to build software programs for their specific needs.

One of the major projects envisaged is the development of a digital market – an online platform – whereby small businesses will use to take part in public tenders.

Ubuntu is the choice for Linux distributions

The Linux distro to be used may be Ubuntu as the City is already running a pilot project of 1000 Ubuntu-based desktops. The news report also reveals that Outlook mail client and Exchange Server will be replaced with Open-Xchange meanwhile Firefox and LibreOffice will take the place of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office.

Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join “Public Money, Public Code” campaign

With this move, Barcelona becomes the first municipality to join the European campaign “Public Money, Public Code“.

It is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation of Europe and comes after an open letter that advocates that software funded publicly should be free. This call has been supported by more than about 15,000 individuals and more than 100 organizations. You can add your support as well. Just sign the petition and voice your opinion for open source.

Money is always a factor

The move from Windows to Open Source software according to Bria promotes reuse in the sense that the programs that are developed could be deployed to other municipalities in Spain or elsewhere around the world. Obviously, the migration also aims at avoiding large amounts of money to be spent on proprietary software.

What do you think?

This is a battle already won and a plus to the open source community. This was much needed especially when the city of Munich has decided to go back to Microsoft.

What is your take on the City of Barcelona going open source? Do you foresee other European cities following the suit? Share your opinion with us in the comment section.

Source: Open Source Observatory

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Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?

We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.

Code paid by the people should be available to the people!

Reposted from PublicCode.eu

REASONS FOR PUBLIC CODE

• Tax savings: Similar applications don’t have to be programmed from scratch every time.
• Collaboration: Efforts on major projects can share expertise and costs.
• Serving the public: Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone.
• Fostering innovation: With transparent processes, others don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Free Software gives everybody the right to use, study, share and improve software. This right helps support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy.

Do you believe that Free Software should be the default option for publicly financed software? Let’s convince your political representatives!

Sign the letter here!

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I’m excited to announce that I’ve been elected to the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Renata Avila to craft DiEM25’s 7th pillar: a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe. 

>Diem 25: The 7th pillar – a progressive tech policy that guarantees individual sovereignty and a healthy commons from ind.ie on Vimeo.

I’m joining the DiEM25 Advisory Panel to help lead a new initiative with Coordinating Collective member (and good friend and long-time ally) Renata Avila to craft the 7th pillar of DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe: An Internet of People.

Beyond surveillance capitalism

Today, we see a Europe in the throes of wholesale capitulation to the digital imperialism of Silicon Valley. We are worried to observe Europe’s growing dependence on the centralised, surveillance-based technologies of a handful of American platform monopolies that share an intimate relationship with the US government. This state of affairs doesn’t bode well for the individual sovereignty of Europe’s citizens or for the national sovereignty of Europe’s member states.

We also see, however, a unique potential in Europe – with its unique history, culture, and approach to human rights – to diverge from this current system of surveillance capitalism and mark its own progressive path ahead.

Progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe

The mission of our initiative is to start a Pan-European process, working together with members of the DiEM25 Network from across Europe, to draft a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe.

DiEM 25: Next stop 2019? May 25-26, 2017 at the Volksbühne, Berlin

Our policy must achieve two important goals. First, in the short term, we must effectively regulate Silicon Valley’s abusive business model in Europe. Second, in the medium-to-long term, we must fund and create an ethical alternative to surveillance capitalism.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space.

Our guiding principles in drafting the 7th pillar of the Progressive Agenda For Europe are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Four Freedoms of the Free Software, the Ethical Design Manifesto, the “Share Alike” philosophy of Creative Commons, and a profound respect for – and a desire to protect and encourage – individual sovereignty and a healthy commons as prerequisites for democracy and progressive internationalism.

An Internet of People

In the words of Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. A democratic Europe and a progressive internationalism cannot be achieved without democratic, progressive technological infrastructure.

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday.

The Internet of People imagines a decentralised, free and open, interoperable, sustainable, and democratic technology infrastructure for a democratic Europe and beyond. It is our progressive counter-narrative to the exploitative, centralised, and feudalistic mainstream narrative exported by Silicon Valley.

Imagine an Internet where everyone owns and controls their own space. Imagine a world where the ability to do this is acknowledged as a basic human right.

In such a world, all of your smart devices – the various technological extensions of your self – connect to your own sovereign node (and to each other) instead of to faceless corporations. That is the Internet of People. The Internet of People is an Internet that respects and protects your human rights and the integrity of your self. It is a basic prerequisite for personhood in the digital age.

It starts in Berlin on May 25th…

We will take the first steps of drafting the 7th pillar in Berlin this Thursday as DiEM25 meets to answer the important question: How can we take our European New Deal to the ballot box in every corner of Europe, and make it a reality?

Renata and I will be holding a 90-minute panel on the 25th to introduce the core philosophy and goals of the 7th pillar. During the first-half of our panel, we will be joined for short presentations by representatives from Free Software Foundation Europe and The Commons Network, Polina Malaja and Sophie Bloemen. The remainder of the panel will be an open round-table discussion with DiEM25 members. In the evening, Renata and I will take to the main stage to introduce the initiative alongside DiEM25 founders Yanis Varoufakis and Srećko Horvat.

Renata and I look forward to working together with the DiEM25 Network across Europe and beyond to craft a progressive, democratic, inspiring European vision to counter Silicon Valley’s neoliberal narrative of surveillance capitalism.

Here’s to an Internet of People, a democratic Europe, and to progressive internationalism.

About the author: Aral Balkan is an activist, designer, and developer. He’s ⅓ of Ind.ie, a tiny social enterprise working for social justice in the digital age.

The post Introducing the 7th pillar of DiEM25: An Internet of People – a progressive tech policy for a democratic Europe. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is one notable aspect to the Volkswagen emission-cheating scandal that few commentators have mentioned:  It would not have happened if the software for the pollution-control equipment had been open source.

Volkswagen knew it could defraud consumers and deceive regulators precisely because its software was closed, proprietary and legally protected from outside scrutiny. Hardly anyone could readily check to see if the software was performing as claimed.

Sure, dogged investigators could laboriously compare actual car emissions to emissions in artificial regulatory tests. That’s essentially what broke open the Volkswagen scandal. But that is an expensive and problematic way to identify cheaters.

The larger question is why should a piece of software that has enormous public health and environmental implications be utterly impenetrable in the first place?  A locked box invites lawless, unaccountable and sloppy corporate behavior. It assures that hardly anyone can see what’s going on. Volkswagen exploited the cover of darkness for all that it could.

This lesson was driven home when columnist Jim Dwyer of the New York Times hailed free software attorney Eben Moglen – the former general counsel for the Free Software Foundation and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center – as “a prophet.”  Dwyer quoted Moglen:

Intelligent public policy, as we all have learned since the earth twentieth century, is to require elevators to be inspectable, and to require manufacturers of elevators to build them so they can be inspected.  If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.

But since the code is proprietary, automakers know that they have plenty of room to cheat.  Not only is the code inscrutable, automakers realize that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has only enough funding to test 10-15 percent of new vehicles. That means “self-certification” is the primary means of enforcement: an utter joke.

Worse, inquisitive consumers can’t even check the software themselves. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is a crime to breach the encryption of copyrighted software and look into its source code.  Wired magazine reported that last year, a number of open source advocates tried to make it legal to scrutinize copyrighted software for “good-faith testing, identifying, disclosing and fixing malfunctions, security flaws or vulnerabilities.”  But of course, the politically powerful auto industry squashed the idea, claiming that open access to the code would pose “serious threats to safety and security.”

The Volkswagen scandal shows that the real, larger threat to security comes from proprietary code controlled by large corporations, not from its open release. Why should we rely upon politically compromised, budget-starved government agencies to enforce the law against corporations who can use technological lockboxes to mask their deceits?  (The Volkswagen scam had been going on for years.)  Why not look to a supremely effective, transparent and virtually free form of enforcement – mandatory open source code?

In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, some brilliant minds made the same point about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of banks and financial institutions.  Why not require the disclosure of key financial statistics so that inquisitive minds could use open data analytics to spot dangerous trends in financial markets with greater speed and ferocity than the SEC?

Volkswagen has shown why open code would make automobiles safer and more environmentally benign.  Why not open code, Moglen asks, for airplanes, medical devices, anti-lock brakes and throttle controls in automobiles? Open source is our best protection against criminal hacking and corporate fraudsters alike.

Memo to government regulators everywhere:  Want to improve public safety and environmental compliance at a fraction of current costs and before the harm happens? Require open source code on critical technologies.

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