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Note: Updated to include lock-in and tying. Some changes on moral rights to clarify that

Laws are more often than not an annoyance, despite their aim to improve the legal framework in any given field. Free Software (AKA "Open Source") has thrived despite the absence of any legal recognition by the law, if not in spite of rules that clearly are shaped around proprietary software. In many jurisdictions it has passed the enforceability test. So, no laws seem necessary to make it work. Yet, can some legal principle be put forward, and included in some laws, to help?

"If it works don't fix it", so goes the common saying. But if it works now doesn't mean it will work forever. It is nevertheless upon lawyers, and legislators alike, to foresee problems ahead of their actual happening, and brace for the potential harmful event. But any laws that would regulate Free Software would likely harm some parts of it, and change the games to favor one kind over another, or impose conditions that are not welcome or productive – something that legislator, even with the best intentions, often do – and in general could cause as many troubles as they would produce benefit. "Primum non nocere" is the paradigm for medical actions, even though drugs by definition only produce a net benefit by inflicting some limited damage. Is there a medicament that has entirely good effects without any negative ones? Arguably there is not. But with laws we can achieve something closer to this optimal benefit, which economists know as "Pareto Efficiency".

So this is a call for Pareto Efficient Laws, and Pareto optimal only laws.

Recently the Koss (Korean Open Source Software) group has organized the first Korean Free Software conference in Seoul, in cooperation with NIPA, the governmental agency for the promotion of Information Technology industry. FSFE contributed to the organization and I, as well as a few other people, have been invited to present our views at the conference.

My speech started like "I knew I should not come to teach, but to learn, and indeed my anticipation was correct". Korea seems to have a lot to teach us. They are coming from behind, but have covered great length, and show some impressive numbers of adoption. At least they have a strategy and an agenda by which public authorities shall adopt Free Software.

On November 17 I will fly over to Korea to attend and speak at what seems the largest Free Software event so far in the country, under the auspices of the Korean Government, through the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), and with the sponsoring also of the FSFE.

A  blog is not a blog if I don't report things that don't interest my readers but concern me. So let me deviate a bit from my usual cointenance and announce a new step in my carreer. As if you bother. In short, I have moved offices and I am now working with new people in the gorgeous and historic Palazzo Serbelloni. There I will team up with more people in Array, namely cybercrime expert Barbara Indovina, as well as Menichino & Associati and top-notch white collar criminal lawyer Giuseppe Pezzotta

A few minutes ago, Oracle has announced that Openoffice.org, the ODF-based Free Software suite for office productivity, will become a community developed project. In plain English, no more dual licensing, no more proprietary version, go ahead to incoming patches. Woot!

I am very happy to hear about this move, which was not entirely unexpected (by me, at least). To tell all the truth, reaching this point was my secret plan when I have started helping Oracle in the merger control procedure opened by the European Commission last year, where the acquisition of Sun was under scrutiny. I was telling everybody that the dual licensing approach was going to die, that id did not make much sense anymore, that it was "moot" – I actually mentioned MySQL there, but the same applies to Openoffice.org, actually. As it turns out, I was right.

Time to switch monitoring tools, and adopting Free Software all the way. So far, as declared in the information pages, I have used Google Analytics to collect some stats on the usage. Not anymore. Now I am using Piwik, a Free Software replacement that does its job easily and cleanly.

Paypal has been reported closing Wikileaks' account through which it obtained donations. This is unacceptable and arbitrary. This is derogatory towards the associations and the thousands of common people who cared enough of their Freedom of Speech to spend money on this. This is why I have decided that if they don't want Wikileaks' money, they do not want mine either, and I have closed my account with them.

Here is what they wrote me:

Dear Carlo Piana,

We are sorry that you have decided to close your PayPal account. With millions of members in dozens of countries and regions across the globe, PayPal is continually improving and expanding its award-winning services.