Sincere Choice

We believe that there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source.

We stand for these principles:

Open Standards: Intercommunication and file formats should follow standards that are sincerely open for all to implement, without royalty fees or discrimination.
Choice Through Interoperability: No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.
Competition by Merit: Software vendors should compete fairly on the merit of their products, rather than by attempting to lock each other's products out of the market.
Research Availability: The people pay for government-funded research, its fruits should be available to all of them equally. We promote Open Source / Free Software licensing as a means of distributing research results fairly.
Range of Copyright Policies: We include the supporters of a broad range of different copyright policies, from Public Domain through Open Source and Free Software to Proprietary. We support use of the GPL and LGPL licenses when appropriate. We assert that Open Source and Proprietary models can be used together effectively.
Freedom to Set Policy: Individual users, businesses, and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use. They should not force their policies upon others.

Today's software market does not provide a level playing field upon which all software producers can compete fairly:

Vendors use deliberately incompatible intercommunication and file formats to lock out their competition.
The customer is often locked into a particular product due to the need to interoperate with other customers who have selected that product.
Legislation tends to favor proprietary software over Open Source, since Open Source has only recently attained a significant role in business.

We seek to provide a fair market in which Proprietary and Open Source software can compete solely on their merits.

Sincere Choice vs. "Software Choice"

The Initiative for Software Choice , not to be confused with Sincere Choice, is an effort organized under CompTIA and (we believe) driven by Microsoft. Although they appear to be promoting similar goals to ours, their policies are written to maintain an unfair bias for proprietary software in the market. We analyze their statements in The Initiative for Software Choice Decomposed.

Contacts

Bruce Perens: (US) 510-526-1165, bruce@perens.com