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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.'"
Don't stop. I think you'll find that there are a lot more greedy companies out there than just Microsoft. For example, what is Intel (primarily a hardware manufacturer) doing on that list?
And the plot thickens...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Leaked letter warns of open source 'threat to eco-system'
Microsoft-funded lobbyist lambasts European Commission.
Matthew Broersma, Techworld
16 October 2006
A leaked letter to the European Commission has revealed the extent of lobbying by proprietary software groups to prevent the widespread adoption of open-source software.
Sent in response to a recent report on the role of open-source software in the European economy, Microsoft-funded pressure group, the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) warned of potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development.
Any action by the EC would "disrupt the entire software eco-system" and the report itself looked "more like a marketing document than a serious survey", according to the letter - written by Hugo Lueders, director of the European branch of the ISC, addressed to Mrs Francoise Le Bail, the deputy director general of the European Commission's industry arm, and provided to Techworld.
You can view the entire letter here [pdf] [1].
The ISC is an organisation created to oppose government efforts in Europe, the US, South America and elsewhere, to give preference to open-source or open standards-based systems. According to critics such as Bruce Perens, the ISC largely pursues a pro-Microsoft agenda, though the group itself emphasises that it has more than 300 members.
Lueders sent the letter 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. The report, titled "Study on the Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Sectors in the EU", found that open source plays a positive role in the economy and recommended its development be encouraged through measures such as tax credits.
Biased?
Lueders said the report seemed biased, since it paid little attention to the non-open source economy. "Balance in this regard is missing... making the study look more like a marketing document than a serious survey," he wrote.
The EU shouldn't encourage open source development, he argued. First of all, it's unnecessary, since open source is already successful - the report notes that 40 percent of companies are using open source, a figure expected to grow by 20 percent a year. In any case, if open source isn't more widely used, it isn't for the Commission to say that that is a bad thing, since the market should be left to make its own decisions, according to Lueders. "In practice the market so far has largely opted for the proprietary model, a choice which should not be ignored, regardless of the purported advantages that the FLOSS system offers," he wrote.
Those in favour of encouraging open source say that market decisions aren't enough to result in a healthy economy, since proprietary software often locks users into particular choices.
Lueders argued that open standards - those that don't require a licence to implement - aren't necessarily such a great thing. Rather, "a variety of different standards" should be maintained for the market to run most efficiently. That includes both "licensed and non-licensed (FLOSS-friendly) standards (i.e. non-RAND standards)". Any action that could dislodge non-open-source-friendly standards "would significantly disrupt the entire software ecosystem", Lueders argued.
The RAND issue
The issue of standards licensed under RAND (reasonable and non discriminatory) terms has been key to the ongoing Microsoft anti-trust negotiations with the Commission. As part of its anti-trust remedies, Microsoft has been required to license Windows communications protocols, and so far has only
Larry Lessig notes that you can't print the letter, thanks to the wonders of the rights management in Acrobat. When combined with the fact that the letter is scanned in, it makes it rather difficult to quote or distribute portions of the letter without sending the whole thing -- either that or we go back to the bad old days where everything needed to be retyped, bringing the possibility of typos and all that. Fortunately, for us Linux geeks (and I'd imagine the rest of the world that installs the software), pdftops will happily convert it to a postscript for easy printing. This is despite the fact that neither Acrobat nor Evince will print the pdf. I'd imagine that XPDF suffers from the same issue.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Using the proprietary Adobe Reader, you don't have access to the security settings to change them to allow you to print it.
Somebody please send Europe copies of this letter,
the one that Dr. Edgar David Villanueva Nunez made Open, to the people of Peru, April 8, 2002. His arguments are still unbeaten, and most still apply to any democratic government.
Poor example. Opera was the source of tabbed browsing, not Mozilla. (Opera wasn't the first, but was the most influential.)
It's quite simple really.
Less than 2% of software development is for packaged sofware.
The other 98% is custom software.
It was bound to happen really. Look at how the bar is being raised with time and operating systems today include software that would have never made it 3 years ago.
In the 1970s a licence for a database for an IBM mainframe would cost thousands of dollars per month. Nowadays you can get one free. It goes beyond a matter of cost; it's that the knowledge behind this software itself becomes commoditized.
And yet, you think that writing packaged software today is more difficult than in previous times? In previous times, before the internet, these markets didn't even EXIST, so what point would writing software have if you couldn't get anyone to buy it? Not to mention that there were many kinds of software that either were not thought of or were computationally impossible to have around.
Seriously, if you write packaged software you know that you're up against competition, and your product might be gone today just as much by a FOSS project than by a competitor that made a better product at a better price. You play the game by the rules; I won't be sorry for you if you lost everything because you gambled against the free market.
Their first conversion attempt failed miserably, windows simply couldn't cut it even when they multiplied the number of servers by 4 compared to the original (FreeBSD) servers they had...
After that they tweaked the front end servers to *look* like windows, when in reality they were still BSD... Things like changing the Apache banner, but it was still clearly apache (some error messages, the ordering of some of the headers etc)...
When they tried again, they managed to migrate the frontend servers over, but they had to use far more machines and they even documented the process and all the difficulties they had in a report meant for management, which later got leaked.. It did a good job of pointing the deficiencies of windows, and pointed out that it wasn't a financially viable migration, and was only done for political motivations, even taking into consideration the fact they didnt have to pay for any of the software and had the highest possible level of vendor support.
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Most of the attention focuses on popular stuff like Word Processors and Paint Programs. Most programmers are not employed doing that sort of thing though. They are writing boring bespoke stock control or trading systems that will probably never attract any open source attention.