Quite simply, "Many governments have come to see proprietary software as a threat to their democratic institutions and have started crafting legislation to meet the challenge." The implications of the use of open source data and processing in a free society are profound. A government's use of data in an open source environment is transparent, for example. Data that is part of the public record cannot be altered to change history arbitrarily (as some academic journals have been doing). The security and reliability of critical processes - such as electronic voting - is most easily established using open source. I join with the author in urging policy-makers to consider Peruvian Senator Edgar David Villanueva Nunez's letter to Microsoft (unlike the author, I will actually link to it (newspapers still have some learning to do about the web)).
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