PmWiki | EAO / Chapter3

(:nl:)Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7

'+'''Chapter 3: The four 'E's+'''' ''Guidelines for a worldwide organisation'' F-LOSS has two distinct movements behind it How might the Christian present FLOSS? Comment on Chapter 3

In this chapter you will find what I call the four 'E's. I will give them to you now as the four reasons why I believe we should be promoting Free Software, and explain both that term and the four E's a little further on. The four reasons are, in order of priority: evangelical, educational, ethical, economical. I will also tell you where they came from. I had been asked to help a group of young Fijian men and women, mostly in their late adolescence, to learn some computer basics. Of course, as often happens in developing nations, the computers and their software were provided by grants from developed nations, including the European Union, despite the fact that the Fiji Islands are about as far from Europe as one can get on the planet. That is all well and good. The operating system and the programs were all Microsoft based, and that too was understandable. But my efforts sometimes took me into schools and villages far from grid-electricity (and indeed from internet), and in schools out in remote villages a computer, apart from being an unusual feature, is rendered practically useless if it is dependent on upgrades, or if something goes wrong, as happens frequently enough with any hardware and software, and the operating system needs to be re-installed.

You might say that in situations like that, legality does not matter but, if something is illegal, then it remains illegal if it comes under international law, anywhere on the planet. So I was not about to try to find, even if I could have found, somebody else's Windows OS disk and boot it up from that. As it was, in the particular village I have in mind, there was the original disk, but nobody had ever taken note of the code to activate it. I had any number of copies (fully legal because under GPL licence and copying is actually encouraged) of Linux OS disks. The problem was solved, in that village and elsewhere, and in describing something of the motivations for all this to a race of people who are deeply religious and respond firstly to evangelical values, I developed a simple, memorable set of four 'E's for them. Subsequently I have found that this approach is attractive in many other parts of the world.

Now, I don't know what people in general would expect a worldwide Religious Congregation to be discussing at its six yearly general meeting (General Chapter), but it would not be hard, after a moment's reflection, to realise that a group of 16,000 plus people involved in education and evangelisation in every imaginable culture and setting would have very substantial and demanding things to discuss and resolve. The Fijian situation possibly represents hundreds if not thousands of similar ones where Salesians find themselves working with the poor and dispossessed.

Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that the Salesian General Chapter in early 2008, offered more than passing reference to Information and Communication Technologies. It would be an unusual but I am sure interesting insight into such an organisation to note what it said, and why. Perhaps we can all learn something from this. Nothing gets through the rigorous process of the commissions-plenary assemblies-back to commissions again process of a General Chapter, which is not worthwhile and heartfelt, even if not fully understood. So it was interesting to note one guideline that 'made it' through this rigorous process in 2008, mandating the leadership of the Congregation to:

-> assess the opportuneness of the use of Free/Libre Open Source Software, through the Department for Social Communication, and give pointers to the Provinces

It is an appropriate question to ask something of the background to Guideline 14, n. 97, as it is known. The first comment might well be to note that the guideline survived (as did all guidelines in GC26) the rigorous process involving commissions, plenary assemblies and a redaction group. The fact of its survival, then, requires some explanation.

It would not be inaccurate to say that a broad awareness of the existence of Free/Libre Open Source (henceforth F/LOSS, to apply the acronym most widely used, including outside the English speaking world, which tends to leave out the '/L') and its possible beneficial implications for both individuals and the institution, was planted by the leader of the Congregation himself (Fr Pascual Chávez), in quite unambiguous terms, three years earlier: one part of his letter to his confreres (n. 390, 2005) has a point 6 which reads:

-> With regard to software there are two different concepts. The concept of a 'closed source' or proprietary software is based prevalently on business and economic criteria; it claims professional rights and guarantees to the user that it will function properly. The other concept is that of the Open Source; it means that the software code should be known, so as to leave the user free not only to use it and adapt it to his needs, but also to improve it by adding his own contribution and making it available to others. It is a vision of shared knowledge that would be of benefit to all. The overcoming of the 'digital divide' between the north and south of the world depends also on the choice of a technology permitting access to information as the right of everyone and not only of those who can afford it. The Open Source is a way of moving towards the democratisation of information and culture'.

The letter was seen by more than one Salesian around the world as an invitation to reflection and action. Several instances amongst others will suffice to illustrate this point. (1) The World Advisory Council for Communications in the Congregation took up the invitation to explore motivations for adopting F/LOSS, as a result of which its Indian counterpart (known as BOSCOM) brought it to a policy level with regard to Centres of Formation to Social Communication, and has subsequently taken other steps to create awareness amongst members of the Congregation in India who are responsible for a technical education system only matched in size by the Indian Government itself. (2) The worldwide meeting of such Centres in Sao Paulo in 2007 asked that an international congress on the broader issues of education and communication involving the use of F/LOSS be set up and the Universidad Politecnica Salesiana in Quito, Ecuador, agreed to do this on behalf of the Salesian Society. (3) The book Digital Virtues which directly explores the question of F/LOSS from the perspective of Consecrated Life, its institutes and members – thus an explicit Christian, Catholic and Religious awareness with regard to F/LOSS, was published in English and Spanish. These factors were already known to members of GC26. (4) Several members have published books using an open publishing methodology, which involves preparation of text, uploading of prepared text to an online publisher and subsequent publishing in digital form which is then available for purchase in hard copy. The process is very different to normal publishing. (5) Fr Chávez' letter, while being the fruit of his own wide reading and his own synthesis and reflection on that, draws substantially from the work of a Salesian, Fr Fabio Pasqualetti, at the Salesian University in Rome (the UPS, as it is known, not to be confused with the UPS in Quito). Pasqualetti had already published some time beforehand, a contribution he had made titled 'The Character of Digital Culture – a Challenge for education”, which is quoted in the course of the Letter. So the ground was well prepared.

Apart from this Salesian context, anybody who keeps a watchful eye on trends in the digital world would have noted the growing interest in and use of F/LOSS approaches and products in the wider community. Server software has for some years been predominantly of this kind (the Internet has run mainly on 'Apache' server software for many years and Domain Name Services mostly involve BIND, another F/LOSS product); the Linux kernel is widely used as an Operating System alternative to the universally known Windows. Open standards for file formats have ISO recognition.

F-LOSS has two distinct movements behind it

(:nl:)