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Letter to European Commission Warns Against Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the set-phasers-to-fud dept.

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.'"

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:fp by scuba_steve_1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm not sure that I agree. OSS has certainly changed the economic landscape...at least for developers...and, by extension, the people that we serve.

    Many commercial products (and frameworks) have gone belly up in the face of OSS competition...while others have lost market share...and the future continues to look rough for folks who make their living selling development tools, libraries, and frameworks. It's tough to compete with legions of altruistic neckbeards.

    Hey...how many folks here still use JBuilder, Cafe, PowerJ, CodeWarrior or one of the many other Java IDEs that dominated 5 or 6 years ago? I fight an uphill battle to buy IntelliJ for each one of my projects...and Eclipse makes it tougher everyday. My last project is currently undergoing a migration from WebLogic to JBoss...and my current project is just now adopting OSS Jasper Reports...unlike my last project, which paid over 20k for licenses for a reporting framework. Yes, Oracle may serve most large sites, but Postgres, MySQL, and others are most likely affecting their bottom line. We are certainly using them whenever we can.

    It's not clear to me how the OSS movement affects the economy. It certainly does, I'm just not sure what the net effect is. It certainly hurts some people while befitting others...but, as a developer, I find it hard to believe that legions of folks giving away their labor helps enhance my bottom line. It may, but it is a very complex equation. That said, I find that writing custom software for enterprises is a heck of a lot safer than working for a software product company...and OSS has a lot to do with that situation in my opinion...and I liked working for product companies.

  2. "IPR has evolved over centuries" by openright · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sure.

    1500's The Stationers had a publishing monopoly. ... for 130 years
    corruption and suppression occured ...
    1700's
    Start over with a 14+14 year copyright monopoly limit.
    1900's
    US copyright monopoly limit extended to 14+28 years.
    US copyright monopoly limit extended to 28+28 years.
    US copyright monopoly limit extended to Life+50/75 years.
    US copyright monopoly limit extended to life+70/120 years.

    The last time copyrighted material was released into the public domain was 1977. (non-renewed material - 1991)
    The next possible time for new material to enter the public domain is 2048.
    That is a huge period of information suppression.

    "Open Source"/"Creative commons" picks up where the "Public Domain" stopped.

    Other things to note:
      Source Software is near obsolete in 30 years, but still possibly useful.
      Binary Software is obsolete in 10 years.

    If the copyright monopoly limits were more aligned with innovation, perhaps Open source/Creative commons would not exist. (And neither would drm).