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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.'"
I wouldn't take it too personally. Anyone who's ever been in the consulting business can tell you that the government is the bread and butter of many-a-company. Anything - and I do mean *anything* - that threatens that revenue stream is considered bad. The companies that have managed to survive through government contracts become quite good at playing the political game. So you can be sure that they're the force behind the lobbying group.
The scary part is that a lot of these companies simply can't survive on the open market, so they turn to the government looking for a "me-too" handout. Unfortunately, they often get it. All they need to do is promise high and deliver low. For a humorous example of this, check out the Virtudyne sage over on The Daily WTF:
Virtudyne: The Founding
Virtudyne: The Gathering
Virtudyne: The Savior Cometh
Virtudyne: The Digital Donkey
BTW, I love this line: "The limited window with which we and others have had to comment clearly has hampered a more comprehensive reply."
Translation: "You didn't give us enough time to buy off the politicians."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What the hell are they talking about? It's all just FUD, but still...One of these days the people that come up with the ideas for just this kind of tomfoolery will be fired, and then they will have to switch careers.
"...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."
Say no more.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Letter to European Commission Warns Against Open Source
No, no no. It warns against open sores. This is the continent that was decimated by the black plague, remember?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The funny thing is that if you look at the authors, these people aren't even scientists!
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
I very much doubt OSS will derail the EU software economy. It's barely made a dent in the US one so far...
Sources?...
There's more to software than Windows+Office vs. Linux+OpenOffice you know. The server market and the embedded devices make heavy use of open-source software, and I doubt its impact is insignificant.
At any rate, I'm sure the Windows operating system would be more expensive if Linux and OSX (yes, it's OSS) weren't the vaguely looming threat to Microsoft that they are. Microsoft might also be a lot more rabid against pirates and illegal users if they had a complete monopoly. If nothing else, I'm convinced the mere existence of OSS actually makes a huge difference in the economy, albeit its effect is indirect.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I bet the owners of thedailywtf.com are saying "wtf?" right about now.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
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...
Is that so?
What percentage of the projects on Sourceforge would describe themselves as "businesses"?
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Sure.
... for 130 years ...
1500's The Stationers had a publishing monopoly.
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).
Our business model is dependent on the non-existence of this other business model. Please outlaw the other one.
Sincerely, Lawl Kathaxbie.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
At any rate, I'm sure the Windows operating system would be more expensive if Linux and OSX (yes, it's OSS)...
Well, Darwin is OSS, but OSX as a whole isn't. I mostly say this as a preemptive strike, because I know someone is going to say it, but it doesn't void what you're saying. OSX server and OSX desktop both rely on a lot of open source. It would have taken Apple far longer to bring it to market if they had started from scratch, and it's benefitting by updates to it's open source components all the time. Therefore, Apple would have a much harder time making their OS competitive if not for the effect of OSS.
I'm convinced the mere existence of OSS actually makes a huge difference in the economy, albeit its effect is indirect.
Economically speaking, software is weird. It seems like it should fit well enough into the established concepts of wealth, but because of the near-zero cost of duplication and distribution, it just doesn't behave the way other forms of wealth behave.
How do you quantify something that can instantly be everywhere if simply left alone in the hands of the consumer?
Traditionally, taking goods without paying for them is harmful because it leaves the provider physically starved of raw materials. Not so with software. Traditionally, the fact that money saved on stolen goods would be spent on something else was NOT an actual benefit to the economy (because of the high cost to the producer). Not so with software (quite the opposite in fact..."stolen" software doesn't deprive the producer of resources at all, and still leaves the consumer with money to pump into the economy elsewise).
How many tech jobs are really grand demonstrations of the broken windows fallacy (no pun intended), and as such potentially economically harmful even though they seem to be boosting the GDP?
Does anyone REALLY believe that making software free (as is the case with open source) will suddenly leave our economy starved of new software? I really have yet to hear a sound argument as to why OSS is economically bad. The jobs it would eliminate are simply artificial "broken windows" type jobs that shouldn't be there in the first place.
Ok I'm done.
... this effort is going behined closed doors... not public until someone finds out and leaks it.
In the public interest......means open to the public to know in such matters as this.
As such it should be made to back fire.
It's not clear to me how the OSS movement affects the economy.
It benefits the economy, just as a cheap, abundant, renewable and nonpolluting energy source would benefit the economy. Specific industries might be harmed, but society as a whole benefits. To argue otherwise is the inverse of the broken window fallacy. And in the case of software, I'd argue that developers are helped more than harmed. What would the demand for web sites be if Apache and PHP cost $1000/seat?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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.
Right now many firm have to fork $/ for microsoft and other proprietary software. They are NOT investing it in their own line of work, and they are not giving value added to their shareholder. Sure the software and PC revolution changed many of this industry forever, but right now this looks more like a tax than a value addition (think : difference of productivity between a worker using windows XP and windows Vista : NIL).
In other word this is the myth of the broken windows all over again : this consulting firm speaks of loosing value and strength in the economy, but in reality the money saved from paying the software would have been more likely to be reinvested into something else. And since msot big software as far as I can tell are US centric, many local economy in the world (i.e. : EU) would ON THE CONTRARY benefit by having the money reinvested locally into something else, instead of giving it away to the other side of the atlantic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
MEETING TO DISCUSS UKUUG INVOLVEMENT IN LOBBYING
All are invited to an informal meeting on
THURSDAY 19 OCTOBER 2006
18:30 - 20:30
Tudor Room, The Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB
The purposes of the meeting are
Speakers will be Leslie Fletcher and Eddie Bleasdale.
"Doesn't it seem like obsoleting most successful software business models all at once, making it harder to make a living as a programmer", would lead to a net loss in software development?", nine-times
.. the more coherent and better understood the software
ecosystem can become.
.. it is an intricate and market-oriented stimulation of innovation that clearly works"
re obsoleting: If that were true we wouldn't have any Open Source software, as where's the money for the programer. The answer is that companies make money selling Open Source solutions and pay the programmers. Most sucessful?. Where do these huge profits come from. Have you factored in the cost of viruses.
Looking back I say we will look at the current situation as an aberation of the market. The only reason you see the huge profits is that once a company 'licenses' a proprietary product and puts all their records on it, they've effectively given away all their IP to a software company. They are locked in to the sofware company for life. The software company issues free lifetime upgrades but only until the next version comes out, at which point your 'license' becomes void and you have to buy a new 'license'.
"Obviously there would still be software, and there might be a long-term gain in pushing towards all software being open-sourced over time, but it's not a simple issue.", nine-times
It has always been able to copyright software. Why all the need for IP legislation. The answer being that if I only use 'proprietary' software I am bound to these IP clauses and am compelled to pay for a license to use the protocols, a guaranted revenue stream into perpetuity. The only obstacle to all this is Open Source. That certain people would like to reduce this to a discussion of 'software' is understandable. Lets see some quote from the ISC letter:
"the more information we [ISC] can gather
For monoculture->insert, ecosystem. For globalwarming->insert climate change
"the study does add more information to this complex issue. It does not holistically reflect the full dynamics now occuring in the vibrant software marketplace."
Vibrant?. 'software' is a drain on a companies balance sheet. On average one fifth of revenue is going up the pyramed. It's a net negative on the balance sheet. No one ever made money out of buying software 'licenses'.
"It must reiterated that FLOSS is merely a business model for distributing software,"
Untrue, you would like us to merely think so. FLOSS according to the FSF is freedom to distribure and further modify the software as well as a developement and collaberation model.
"the proprietary model is supported to a large extent by a complex system of rights (i.e. IPR)
translation: We will give you bits of paper and you will give us money. You see having achieved such strangle hold on the market through the use of IP legislation and cross-licensing-do-not-sue-agreements that's there's no point going Open Source.
re Re:I, too, am convinced
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