Who said states can?t play a significant role in the market economy? In a surprise move,French MPs are proposing to generalise the use of open standards, access to the source code and to introduce the ?right to develop compatible software?.Jean-Yves Le Deaut, Christian Paul & Pierre Cohen, three socialist French MPs belonging to the governmental majority, are proposing a law in order to ?increase liberties and consumer protection, and improve economic competition in the information society?. This law requires the use of open standards as well as software which source code is accessible in all public administrations and organisations. Moreover, this law guarantees the possibility for anyone to freely develop, publish and use compatible software, even in the case a patent or a trademark was filed for some communication standard.This law is based on five historical, juridical or constitutional principles: free access to public information, retrievability of public data, national security, consumer security and

interoperability. The principle of free access to public information requires that whenever digital data is exchanged with citizens or between public administrations, the way this data is encoded and exchanged should not depend on the technology of a single vendor but rather use public encoding techniques and protocols, also known as open communication standards. Therefore, Article 1 states that ?whenever exchanging

digital information, public administrations, organisations and agencies are required to use open communication standards, based on public rules and processes to exchange digital data.?The principle of retrievability of public data requires that digital data created and archived by public administrations should be retrievable in its original form at any point in time, even after 10 or 20 years, even if the software which was used to create this data is no longer maintained by its vendor. The only way to guarantee this is to use software which source code is available. Moreover, considering the recent advances of the Echelon digital intelligence system, access to the source code is also required for national security in order to ensure that software used by public administrations and organisations do not include security holes. In order to raise the level of competition in the information society, the law also guarantees the right to develop compatible software. This law protects commercial publishers of proprietary software and developer communities of free software against anticompetitive strategies by enforcing in a practical matter the interoperability principle introduced in the European software directive of 1991. Article 3 states that

?any individual or moral person has the right to develop, publish and use an original software which is compatible whith the communication standards of another software.?This law can be implemented immediately because most software publishers are ready to adopt open communication standards such as those defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Many publishers of proprietary software, including Microsoft, have also publicly stated that they are ready to grant the French administration access to the source code of their products.