Letter to European Commission Warns Against Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "TechWorld is reporting that they have a leaked copy of a letter written to the European Commission detailing the extent of lobby pressure coming from proprietary software groups working against open source software. From the article: 'Lueders sent the letter [PDF] on 10 October to leaders of the Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry, in response to an EC-commissioned study into the role of open source software in the European economy (referred to by Lueders as Free/Libre/Open Source, or FLOSS). In the letter, he criticised the study as biased and warns that its policy recommendations, if carried out, could derail the European software economy.'"

Comments

Re:I, too, am convinced

[megaditto]

Well, playing Devil's advocate here, I am yet to see multiple solid innovations originate in OSS.

This usually goes the other way, with Sun or Apple (or even Microsoft) coming up with something neat, then the OSS community copying that.

For-profit companies have a lot more resources to look for, recognize, and eventualy implement a great idea.
So in that respect, going completely OSS (without say, our tax dollars picking up the lack of funding) would stiffle such innovation.

"European Software Economy"?

[Greyfox]

Now what would that be, exactly? The Global software economy is Microsoft. You're either Microsoft or you're prey for Microsoft. Apple and Google might be able to mount a challenge to the great evil but I don't see anyone other than OSS who can even hope to.

If you want to get a software economy going in another country you could do worse than mandating open source software for government operations and then contracting programmers to write custom code (to be placed in the creative commons) for tasks that don't currently have OSS code. Custom programming is where pretty much all the work is if you're a software engineer and not employed by Microsoft, Google or Apple.