El uso del software libre en las administraciones públicas de la UE

34pero debe existir un equilibrio que incentive la provisión con un costesocial y económico razonable. El problema de la provisión cambia, sinembargo, cuando se trata de una provisión que, como en el caso delFLOSS, no exige beneficio. En este caso existe la posibilidad demantener el precio de coste sin merma de los beneficios sociales yeconómicos.These familiar ideas are presented here to remind us of a point that is too oftenforgotten in the debate about open source and free software: the strong bias of publicpolicy should be to spread public goods at their marginal cost. Compromises are nodoubt necessary if private actors are to contribute voluntarily to the production ofpublic goods; but public entities, such as governments, should not indulge in thesecompromises unless they are necessary. Between two systems for producing a publicgood, one that releases the information produced by that good freely and one thatdoes not, all things being equal, public policy should favor free access. This is notbecause of some egalitarian bias or because of ideals about social equality but forpurely neoclassical economic reasons: free access brings the cost of informationdown to its marginal cost, and neoclassical economics favors price at marginal costs.If the problems of incentives have already been solved for a particular good or classof goods—no doubt a large assumption, but for some important software goods atrue one—then there is no further reason to exclude access to the public goodsproduced. Or if the provision problem is sufficiently solved by other systems ofincentive, then again there is no reason to exclude the public goods produced (Lessig2002, 59).Este análisis proporciona una perspectiva general que encuadra laacción gubernamental y la defensa de los bienes públicos en el marcodel beneficio social. Pero existen para Lessig, a un segundo nivel,razones para decantar las preferencias en favor del uso del FLOSS enla administración pública basadas en una diferencia de criterio.Evans maintains that the government should make decisions about whether to adoptopen source or free software in the same way as private actors should: the onlyquestion it should ask is what software maximizes efficiency. I agree with hisprinciple, but we must be careful about how it is applied to the particulars of thecase, because the factors that determine efficiency for governments arefundamentally different from the factors that determine efficiency for private actors.Governments are not competitors in the sense that private actors are. They have agreater interest in externalizing benefits that other competitors might share (Lessig2002, 64).Esta posibilidad de externalizar beneficios del FLOSS, a la que ya seha referido Bessen, puede ser útil a varios niveles, desde su usocompartido por otras agencias gubernamentales o por otros agentessociales hasta la misma promoción de la industria de softwarenacional, y este es un criterio añadido que la administración nocomparte necesariamente con la empresa privada, un criterio propio.