To guarantee the free access of citizens to public information, it is
indespensable that the encoding of data is not tied to a single
provider....
To guarantee the permanence of public data, it is necessary that the
usability and maintenance of the software does not depend on the
goodwill of the suppliers, or on the monopoly conditions imposed by
them. For this reason the State needs systems the development of which
can be guaranteed due to the availability of the source code.
-- David Villanueva Nuñez, Congressman, of the Republic
of Perú, in a letter to Juan Alberto González, General
Manager of Microsoft, Perú, April 8, 2002. as reprinted by The
Register http://www.theregister.col.uk/content/4/25157.html