Should I have a personal FOSS policy - a set of principles by which my software decisions are made? I suppose in some sense I already do. I use Mozilla Firefox all day long, every day. I use OpenOffice wherever possible. I use GIMP for my photo editing. I use Pidgin for IRC, and a host of other FOSS packages. But do these choices I have made amount to anything more than a set of preferences, or, less charitably, prejudices? Is there any coherent policy that could be distilled from them?

Maybe it's just me, but this is a question I ask myself on a regular basis. And it is also a question I frequently ask universities and colleges.

I suppose in theory the way to go about things would be to come up with your policy first and then implement it in practice. But that isn't the way life generally works. Instead we tend to have a practice that gets modulated or modified as we take up the policy challenge. And that explains why it is so useful to come back and ask the policy question again and again.

In practice I find that I am a pragmatist, but a principled one. For example, I'm not averse to using a proprietary operating system (no prize for guessing which one). But I would also be just as happy using Ubuntu. Over many years I have structured my work environment so that I use the same set of programs regardless of which operating system I'm using. My pragmatism forces me to use whatever operating system is available to me. My principles help arrange it so that I'm (mostly) using a FOSS suite of programs regardless of operating system.

When institutions approach the FOSS question they also tend to strike a pragmatic balance. Some like to have an explicit FOSS policy that lays out how FOSS ought to be factored in to the IT decision-making process. Others will have no explicit FOSS policy at all, subsuming all such matters into a broader IT strategy. I know of one ICT Strategic Plan which is 111 pages long, 3 years in the making, yet contains no mention of open source software or free software in the entire document; in fact, the word software is not used at all. This, despite the fact that FOSS is used across the IT infrastructure at that institution.

Policy can also find a home at a much higher level, of course. It's the sort of thing governments are good at generating. It would be a worthwhile mini-project to gather data on just how many of the eIFL.net member countries have national policies concerning FOSS.

What I most want to know, however, is not merely whether a country, or an institution, or a person has a FOSS policy. What I want to know is how that policy (whether it is publicly accessible or not) is affecting real decision-making on the ground. Not, "Do you have a FOSS policy?", but rather, "What has been the practical impact of your FOSS policy?"

The space between policy and practice - that's where I'm headed. But first, I think I'd better get my personal FOSS policy written down :-)

What's the impact of your FOSS policy on your practice?

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