Legal issues

1.

Fight software patents at all levels. The impact of software patents on open source software can be specially harmful. Attention should be paid to ensure that patent legislation cannot be used as a weapon against open source software.

2.

Ensure the freedom to build free software implementations which can interoperate with proprietary interfaces. To be able of replacing proprietary components, and to interoperate with them, open source software needs the ability of recreating interface (header) files (see subsection 6.1, on copyright and open source software). We believe that this freedom should be maintained and tutelated in any possible way, because header rewriting is in many cases the only way to circumvent proprietary software libraries. The freedom to use inverse engineering techniques to understand proprietary protocols and interfaces (both hardware and software) is also basic for building free software applications which can interoperate with them.

3.

Improve the legal framework so that calls for tenders are open to free software solutions. Better rules should be written to allow call for tenders to be open to open source software systems. They should be written with a minimal set of requirements that match the tender needs, instead of amounting to basically seeking the best price for a given proprietary solution.