Memorandum requesting Freedom of Knowledge and usage of Free Software at CSIR

"Our scientists should become civic scientists and contribute towards societal transformation. Civic means concerning or affecting the community or the people. In the new capacity, scientists step beyond their campuses, laboratories, ministries and institutes and move into the center of their communities to engage in active dialogue and action with their fellow citizens. They should ask themselves a question, how their knowledge can make an impact on the common man's life. Our civil servants and others in the service sector should become fearlessly people-friendly, have a positive attitude, and provide responsive, proactive, transparent and unbiased administration and service to the billion people."

- from the Address to the Nation by the President of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on the eve of the 55th Republic Day, 2004

The CSIR does valuable research, and its works are of direct use to our industries, academic community and research scholars. This memorandum is to request CSIR to adopt using free software, and its philosophy, enabling more freedom in accessing the research works of CSIR to enrich and ensure greater profits for our country.

I. Freedom of Knowledge

The current policy at CSIR centers around profiting directly by managing and licensing patents and its other research publications and findings. This memorandum seeks to reverse this policy, to enable free access to the research generated through CSIR, for the following reasons:

1) The CSIR is funded by the Government, and therefore, its research findings and publications ought to be made freely and openly available to the public, for free access by all citizens, including industries and the academic community.

2) Duplication of research would be greatly avoided when the research findings are made public and open, and further, advancement of science is possible only when the academic community has free access to the research publications.

4) Sharing of knowledge and wealth is inherent in our culture and traditions as is evident from the evolution of vedic wisdom, mathematics, grammar, epistemology, and knowledge touching every part of our lives that became possible because of active debates on the freely accessible texts and works of scholars. Copyrights and patents put brakes on the growth of our veritable base of knowledge and wisdom, and easing access to research resources would spur development to greater heights. In the free software community, tools evolve through debates, and bad ideas are rejected, leaving behind solid and robust code. Our own rich traditions, and the success of the free software movement prove and establish the scientific superiority of freely sharing information. As long as the patent regime exists, traditional Indian wisdom may be protected from abuse but ought to remain free as ever for all to know, share, use and develop.

5) The contribution to our country of profits earned by CSIR by managing and licensing its research outcome, would pale in comparison to the profits earned by our entrepreneurs by using the knowledge discovered and techniques perfected. If the knowledge relating to making better pots or water filters is released into the public domain, hundreds of artisans would benefit and the public at large would enjoy the fruits of research by CSIR in a direct way. Moreover, since everyone would have a level playing ground as far as knowledge is concerned, the quality of products would improve since it would become difficult to promote sub standard products through mere gimmicks. The gains for society would be much beyond what CSIR earns in terms of royalties.

6) Unlike scarce conserved resources like land or other material wealth, software and all kinds of knowledge can be freely shared without restrictions. Artificial bounds on knowledge only pamper the greed of a few individuals at the cost of the majority. Making the publications free (in the sense of freedom) would hardly eat into the turnover in the form of subscriptions since most people who read the journals regularly would anyway prefer to read a hard copy. On the other hand, this would permit people who are not regular readers of a particular journal to get access to specific papers in that journal that they may be interested in. Though this may reduce the income of CSIR through subscriptions or licensing fees, the society as a whole would benefit and more than compensate for the loss of revenue of the CSIR.

7) Opening up a free access to science and research activities at CSIR would strengthen our roots and help us grow stronger. Our knowledge of science needs to be constantly updated and made available to all, to infuse scientific attitude and aptitude in all. Dr. Digumarti Bhaskara Rao has observed:

"The study of science imparts training in scientific method and develops scientific attitude and scientific aptitude in the learners. These qualities, viz., scientific attitude, scientific aptitude are the major aspects to qualify an individual to live as truly efficient citizen in the present day scientific society." (Ref. 1)

Therefore, please ensure that all have the freedom to freely access and use the valuable research output from CSIR, which is required to ensure a free society based on science and knowledge.

II. Using Free Software

Free software is software that comes with source code and the freedoms to use, to study, to modify and to distribute (Ref. 2). Free software empowers people while proprietary software keeps people divided and helpless. A wide range of kernels, shells, compilers, database servers, web servers, mail servers, scripting tools and other programs are available as free software which is also technically superior to proprietary software. Please note that free software has several strengths (Ref. 3), and its adoption would aid CSIR in many ways, as follows:

1) Freedom: Free software gives the utmost freedom in using high quality software, with more than twenty years of development efforts behind it, by the best minds and hearts resulting in sturdy code that has withstood the test of time and usage by millions of people around the globe for commercial and non-commercial use. Availability of source code, along with the freedom to modify, study and redistribute the software are important features that the scientific community would ask for, and which are provided only by the free software movement. Using free software is not only scientific but would also save costs for CSIR.

2) Public Standards: Free software predominantly uses internationally accepted free standards such as XML and LaTeX that are public and not owned by any private entities. Currently, at CSIR, research submissions are to be made only in Microsoft Word document format, which is a proprietary format. This forces contributors to purchase and use the proprietary software, thus restricting the freedom to use the software of their choice. Besides, this unfortunately can be seen as unintentionally promoting a particular company's products and formats.

3) Security: Free software is robust and secure, because the system configuration and software can be modified only by users authorised by the administrator and not anyone else. Applications do not execute programs that are received through email without conscious user invocation, which makes viruses virtually non-existent in the free software world.

4) Stability: Free software is inherently very stable, and system crashes are virtually unheard of. The web servers that have set records for longest continuous runs without rebooting are generally based on Free Software. This stability means lower lost working hours and more working comfort, which translates into greater productivity.

Therefore, using free software and its philosophy at CSIR would pave way for stronger scientific research and development and substantial progress for all of us. We hence request you to research our claims and take appropriate action to adopt free software and its philosophy at the earliest.

We therefore request that:

(1) CSIR place all the knowledge they research and develop in the public domain, by publishing their research publications and findings on the Internet for free access and download by those who desire, giving freedom to access, know, use and share the wealth of scientific knowledge to enrich all citizens, including industries and academic researchers.

(2) All software developed at CSIR should be designed for use in a free operating system like GNU/Linux and should be released under the GNU General Public License, or a similar free software license, so that the benefits from the software are available to everyone.

(3) CSIR move all its computers from proprietary operating systems to a free operating system like GNU/Linux in a specified time frame.

(4) All CSIR publications should accept and publish material in non-proprietary open formats like XML and LaTeX.

The Free Software Foundation will always be glad and happy to offer assistance to the CSIR in using free software, and its philosophy.

References:

(1) Digumarti Bhaskara Rao, in Prof. Marlow Ediger, Editor, Scientific Attitude vis-a-vis Scientific Aptitude, 1996, Discovery Publishing House, New Delhi-110002, p.8

(2) "Free as in Freedom" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy

(3) "Why Free Software?" http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/Data/Objects/freeSW