When journalists and FOSS advocates explain why governments and corporations in the developing world are rapidly migrating to free software, a lot of focus is put on cost savings from licensing and removing the potential for liability from piracy within their organizations.

While these reasons are certainly valid, an often over-looked but equally (if not more) important reason for moving to free software is sovereignty. Richard Stallman recently went further by asserting that it is the duty of governments to protect their sovereignty by using free software:

Every public agency has a duty to maintain its control over its computing, as a matter of sovereignty. Using a non-free program means giving the program’s developer control over that computing. Thus, public agencies must reject proprietary software and move to free software. Venezuela and Ecuador are on the right track.

Look at it this way: would the U.S. federal government entrust the day-to-day functioning of their computer systems to a foreign software company which doesn’t let them see what the software is really doing? Especially when there are rumors (or evidence, depending on who you ask) that the foreign software company has built-in backdoors for that foreign company’s intelligence service? Especially as operating systems move to a Software-as-a-Service model where data is potentially stored on that foreign company’s servers, a government like Venezuela (which can be reasonably sure that the United States had some part in an illegal coup attempt against democratically-elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) would have to be extraordinarily negligent to operate their most sensitive systems on foreign software which doesn’t give them access to see what’s happening under the hood. In a situation like this, governments could be held hostage by proprietary software companies who are ultimately the only ones who have access to critical data and operational systems.

In fact, Venezuela’s decision to move to free software happened after a disaster scenario like this actually took place. In 2002, the traditional, social elite-backed administrators of PDVSA (Venezuela’s state-owned oil company) decided that they didn’t agree with President Chávez’s policy decisions, which included re-directing profits from the oil company elites into social programs (including literacy and medical programs). These administrators were so adamant about their position, they illegally shut down the oil company, locked out the workers, and took control over the software that ran the corporation. Conveniently, that software had been contracted to a US company called SAIC, which has well-known relationships with the US Department of Defense and CIA. In response to the illegal lock-out and sabotage of oil production in Venezuela, federal authorities were sent to PDVSA’s headquarters to reclaim the facility.

The SAIC workers realized that they had committed an enormous crime and fled the country — after they had changed all the passwords that ran PDVSA’s computer systems and set themselves up with remote control of these systems. Since the software was proprietary, no one except the SAIC workers knew how the software worked internally and the oil facilities were literally held hostage by criminals who were now seeking refuge in the United States. Why US authorities did not take action and apprehend these criminals is up for the reader’s interpretation. If the SAIC workers had used their remote access to destroy the data, they would have effectively sabotaged oil production in Venezuela for months, if not years.

The Venezuelan government recruited some computer security experts who were able to reverse engineer SAIC’s software, cut off their remote control of the computer systems and return access to the legal administrators of PDVSA. After this startling information warfare scenario had played out in real life, threatening the entire economy of a sovereign state by a multinational software firm with strong ties to a foreign defense and intelligence agency, President Chávez fully embraced open source, free software and mandated that all government systems be migrated to this more secure solution.

This real-life nightmare scenario is surprisingly under-reported but it couldn’t provide a more convincing argument for why governments have a public duty to reject proprietary software. In the United States, this worst-case scenario may very well be played out during every election as the government uses proprietary “e-voting” software which they cannot audit. Numerous researchers have discovered that because of this situation, the United States is extremely susceptible to ballot fraud. With each election that uses secret, proprietary software, US citizens must ask themselves if every vote actually does count in US elections. The HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy”, presents these research results and the results of their own investigations, which expose unbelievable vulnerabilities in US election software. In countries like Brazil, governments are switching to voting software based on free software, allowing the state to audit exactly what the software is doing. In the United States, still very little has been done to rectify these problems.

So, protecting sovereignty is not only a problem for developing nations. Proprietary software could be sabotaging democracy here in the United States, during every election. Large and small companies are increasingly asking themselves if they have data about their company that they want to protect and how that could ever be possible if they use proprietary software which prohibits them, by contract, to ever know what their operating systems and databases are really doing.

The solution is very simple. Use free software.

Convinced yet? Get in touch with North by South to begin migrating your company or public agency to open source & free software today. :)