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

Not Personal

[AKAImBatman]

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."

Look at the funding

[Karzz1]

"...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.

Economy?

[gr8_phk]

In the letter, he criticised the study as biased and warns that its policy recommendations, if carried out, could derail the European software economy.

But what about the benefits to other parts of the economy?

Re:fp

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:fp

[scuba_steve_1]

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.

"IPR has evolved over centuries"

[openright]

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).

Dear EC

[Lord Bitman]

Our business model is dependent on the non-existence of this other business model. Please outlaw the other one.
Sincerely, Lawl Kathaxbie.

Re:Not only that, but you can't print the letter

[whoever57]

Larry Lessig notes that you can't print the letter, thanks to the wonders of the rights management in Acrobat.

Xpdf doesn't seem to have any problems printing the letter. It must be a bug in Acrobat Reader </humor>

Re:I, too, am convinced

[nine-times]

Does anyone REALLY believe that making software free (as is the case with open source) will suddenly leave our economy starved of new software?

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? 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.

Re:I, too, am convinced

[Bert64]

It would cut down on the type of programmers who only ever think of the money. People who learn a language as quickly and hap-hazardly as they can, just because of the money, and then go on to do as little work as possible while maximising income.
You'd still have the kind of programmers who enjoy programming, and write software for personal achievement.
You'd also still have service or hardware driven companies employing programmers to write support software for their hardware (drivers etc, which are usually given away for free) and support customers of outsourced services. companies like Sun, Intel and IBM.
The business model of selling software will be rendered invalid, as it should be, any industry where you can produce infinite product for little or no cost is utterly ridiculous.

In fact, any industry where production costs are disproportionately small relative to the sale cost is ridiculous... And requires anti-capitalist enforcement to maintain, otherwise the natural progression of capitalism will result in third parties providing the goods at a far more reasonable cost (such behaviour is unnaturally branded as "piracy" or "counterfeiting" by those anti-capitalists)