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How To Hijack an EU Open Source Strategy Paper
Glyn Moody writes "Thanks to the indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to see how an organization close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write — and hijack — an important European Union open source strategy paper, currently being drawn up. Analyzing before and after versions visible in the document demonstrates how the Association for Competitive Technology, a lobbying group partially funded by Microsoft, is trying to widen the scope of open source to include 'mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code.'" And reader Elektroschock adds some detail on EU processes: "The European Commission lets ACT and CompTIA participate in all working groups of the European Open Source Strategy, which defines Europe's future open source approach. A blue editor questions the objectives: 'Regarding the "Europe Digital Independence" our [working] group thinks it is, in general, not an issue.' 'European digital independence' is a phrase coined by EU Commissioner V. Reding, that is what her European Software Strategy was supposed to be about. She didn't reveal that lobbyists or vendors with vested interests would write the strategy for the Commission."
It should be obvious by now that proprietary, off-the-shelf, software is on its way out. Off-the-shelf software only amounts for around 10% of the total software production, and the bespoke market has always avoided proprietary solutions where possible, to avoid vendor lock-in. Microsoft, with its huge armies of developers and vast collections of existing tools could easily own a huge chunk of the bespoke market, so why are they fighting the transition so hard? Is there some kind of long-term plan, or are they just hoping to turn back the clock?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If you protect your markets you destroy your exports. Exports are what drive our economy. Just like the Smoot-Holey Act in the 30's did your support of protectionism, if successful, will do far more damage to the economy than the banks have.
'Microsoft leaned on EC to spike open source report'
'One might ask, "Who are these lobbyists?", so let's take a closer look'
I was on a plane reading Slashdot on my iPhone... the first headline came up "How To Hijack ..." and the air marshal in the seat next to me karate-chopped my neck and now I'm in Gitmo.
Thanks a lot Slashdot.
oh, by the way...can someone call me a lawyer?
Great. So Microsoft gets the US and everywhere else gets Free Software? If it wasn't for free trade, MS would never have got to Europe in the first place.
More yet, if you protect your market, you make your people poorer (except for the owners of protected companies). But that is valid only for protectionism... If you protect your markets from Microsoft (or any other kind of fraud) you'll make our people richer and will increase the competitiveness of your exports (except for items that bundle with Windows).
Rethinking email
The name "European Digital Independence" would seem to indicate that, yes. Which makes it especially dumb for them to accept input from Microsoft.
Because it's always good for the US to cut its own throat just because the Europeans are cutting theirs.
Not really.
Outside of Ireland the the UK, Microsoft is simply not as big in Europe as it is in the states. Time and again I have heard the same story. Linux shops and linux systems are simply more common in mainland Europe than Microsoft systems. Which is not to say that Microsoft systems are not there. They're just not there as much.
A lot of this is down to language and cultural barriers. A lot. It is very difficult for American companies to adapt to business on the continent. Going from an environment of 50 states with the same currency, culture and language, to 25 states with different languages, cultures, currencies (less now), and even legal systems is difficult. In North America, it's common for a franchise to expand across the entire continent at a rapid pace. I doubt there even is a franchise across the entire continent of Europe.
But, it's also true that European governments do balk at the idea of an American operating system controlling all of their computers. The English and Irish do not really see this as a problem, but I'm sure that the French view the situation as an anathema. The same goes for products like Oracle. But this is not a new development. These problems have existed for years.
May the Maths Be with you!
Money has no homeland.
Microsoft is a multinational, it has employees and shareholders all around the world. The shareholders don't give a fuck about the USA or any other country.
This may come as a shock to you, but real governments (i.e., governments unlike the US government of the last eight years) don't just make sweetheart deals with private contractors. They actually do a lot of work themselves, and very often, software is involved in the process. When it comes to wise use of citizens' tax dollars (or euros, as the case may be) finding OSS solutions which can replace expensive proprietary software is pretty high on the list.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
oh, by the way...can someone call me a lawyer?
OK, you're a lawyer.
Free Martian Whores!
Ireland offers massive tax cuts, so MIOL licenses the EMEA software sales from Ireland. Other companies do the same. The Irish economic wonder is nothing but tax dumping for multinationals from the United States, at the expense of the US tax income of course and for the benefit of Ireland.
Interesting. How does open source and interoperability spending qualify as protectionism. It is more anti-dependency, deprotectionism.
This is like the EU deciding what oil individuals should use in all their cars.
Your opinion of this would certainly change if you had the choice between buying Shell oil (they get to set all their own prices) and growing/making all the oil you need in your own backyard. You would be screaming about anti-competitiveness, Monopolies, etc..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Oh come on, you're blowing this way out of proportion.
Right now, the EU is highly dependent on proprietary software from the US. Is it really so strange that they don't like this? No country likes to be dependent on another country for essential goods. It's not much different from the US disliking their dependence on foreign oil.
And rather than demanding non-US software, the EU just wants guarantees in the form of less restrictive licensing (open source). Does this make it easier for other countries to compete? Yes, it does. Does it mean that the US is disadvantaged? No, it doesn't. As long as the US produces quality software for a reasonable price, the EU will keep buying.
Oh, and for the record: I'm an EU citizen who is employed by a major US software house.
I thought there were open source based companies in America too. I also thought there were plans to increase adoption of open source in public administrations in America too. Finally, I thought America already had a host of protectionist measures in place for several economic sectors.
Basically, what the hell are you talking about?
I am getting so sick of the Smoot-Harley comments whenever the topic of tariffs comes up. There are issues with protectionist tariffs, but the reason Smoot-Harley was such a disaster is that the tariffs were fixed in dollar per item rather than a percentage of price. During the deflationary spiral of the 1930's, this resulted in the tariff's being as high as 60% of the cost of a tariffed item. Personally, I think we need to have some tariffs so that imported goods carry the same load in our society as domestically produced goods to level the playing field. It does not make sense that domestically produced goods carry a significantly higher tax burden than those produced abroad.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
In the US, "Organic" used to mean untarnished by nasties. The Big Food lobby got "Organic" re-defined to mean mostly untarnished. Now "100% Organic" means totally untarnished. So maybe soon we'll have "100% Open Source" (as supported by Mr Stallman) vs the new "Open Source" with proprietary lock-ware in it.
People round here fail to see, for reasons unbeknown to me, that Microsoft is not exceptionally evil as corporations go.
Well, there's Union Carbide, who killed thousands of Indians and whose CEO is still on India's most wanted fugitive list.
There's Haliburton.
There's Sony and their XCP rootkit.
There's Purina, who was too cheap to put doors on an elevator and my grandfather went four stories down without an elevator car, carrying two 100 lb sacks of grain. I absolutely HATE them, as you might possibly understand (and it was 50 years ago this year).
There's that chicken company that burned up all those minimum wage workers because they chained the fire doors shut.
There's the peanut place that killed a few people and sickened thousands.
Then there's the oil industry.
There's the banks, giving million dollar bonuses to the people who are running them into the ground. All of these are more evil than Microsoft.
And the fact that few corporations pay any US Federal Income tax at all is pretty evil, too. Does MS pay Federal Income Tax?
But just because everyone else if evil doen't give you an escuse to be, too. Waht did your mother say about all your friends jumping off a bridge?
Free Martian Whores!
The U.S. economy was built on protectionist policies. It's funny how they would get there if protectionist actually was all that harmful. Or take England, as another example: previously protectionist. Is it possible that selective protectionism may be good for a developing economy and bad for a developed economy, as empirical evidence would suggest? And that free markets would be good for -- wait for it! -- the proponents of free markets, i.e. rich nations?
The fact you have choices for which OS to install on your computer proves Microsoft is, in fact, *not* a monopoly. PsyStar vs. Apple is actually a great example for WHY Microsoft is not a monopoly. If you buy a PC from PsyStar you can choose OS X or Windows. The lawsuit shines light on the scenario greedy scumbags have thrust upon the consumers against their will, a scenario that obfuscates real issues with half-truths or complete fallacies about software licenses, end user agreements, and monopolistic practices. Because you have the freedom to choose Dell, HP, Apple, PsyStar or any other PC vendor, means you have the freedom to buy a PC with an OS other than from Microsoft.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
For starters, you must be a techie. For you to think that a monopoly is an absolute measurement shows that you think this way.
A monopoly is not a company that is exclusive in an industry. It's a company that has such an effective control over its industry that most people pretty much equate the company with the industry. And, as most people here point out, that's not illegal. When you use the control in one industry (OS) to project into another industry (Office), THAT is illegal. That you have competitors in the first industry is only significant if those competitors have significant mindshare and people treat the competitor as similar enough to weigh their options.
Apple's mindshare is rising enough to start to threaten the monopoly status of Microsoft. That doesn't mean that PsyStar has any bearing on it. Their mindshare is close enough to zero to make Linux on the Desktop look like a reality.
Remember: a healthy industry has two major competitors slugging each other out at about 40% marketshare each, a third competitor between 15 and 20% marketshare, largely ignored by the first two, and then a myriad of minor competitors making up the rest of the market, filling niche needs in that market. A dominated, but not monopolistic, industry has its number one company at about 60% marketshare, a number two at 30-40%, a number three company trying to get double digit percentages, and possibly a few others eeking out their living in niche markets. The desktop operating system market is not anywhere near these. Microsoft is sitting over 80%, Mac is somewhere around 5-10%, and others are filling niche roles. The server operating system market is not, from what I can tell, hugely different, though Mac and Linux might have their numbers reversed.
What Europe are you speaking of?? I live in Western Europe (in Belgium); people, businesses and organizations use *much* more Microsoft systems than Linux systems. If you go to the store and buy a PC, it comes with Windows preinstalled. At work, our file/database/mail server runs Linux, but all the desktops run Windows. I know that many small businesses are like that, and that there are also a lot that are 100% Microsoft. Many people still don't realize that the computing world is larger than Microsoft alone (that is starting to change now, but more because of Apple than because of Linux).
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
If you protect your markets you destroy your exports.
Japan seems to be doing just fine with it. Compare who made your TV and their TVs. Your phone and their phones (yeah yeah, excluding iPhones).
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The fact that a huge number of the big players in open source (Novell, Sun, Red Hat, Xandros, IBM, the Free Software Foundation, Google, Mozilla, et al) are American or America-based should be the first big sign that protectionism would be a daft name for it.
You could see it as a stimulus for Europe, seeing as many of the best proprietary companies are American or Japanese. But ultimately FOSS is completely anti-protectionist; if the intellectual property is impossible to control (thanks to the licensing), how can you use it to lock out foreign competitors?
Ultimately, it's just the EU not liking being at the mercy of a foreign monopoly. Makes just as much sense as the US trying to ween itself off of foreign oil.
The EU does what the US should have done: encourage competition and punnisch illegal actions taken by dominant companies. Period. Good riddance. I'd rather have a choice between a Windows and a Linux and a whatever PC than only to have the choice to buy "Made for Vista" crap.
Fsck DRM. Fsck DirectInput. Fsck Direct3D. Fsck closed formats and protocols. Fsck lock-in. Fsck backdoors. Fsck x86 dominance (where's my 200 dollar/euro 64 threads CPU with a 1000% performance increase, huh?). Etc...
Here be signatures
Microsoft is a protectionist company that combats freedom of governments to promote open source, interoperability and a free market, it does so simply because its business strategy is protectionism and lockin.
The only victim here is the readership of Slashdot. There is a concerted campaign here to slate Microsoft regardless of any basis in reality.
[1] [actonline.org]
That's disingenuous at best.
Microsoft may be one of 59, but most of the rest are Microsoft partners.
To pick only the headlined companies:
These smaller, entrepreneurial technology firms like Sax Software, ComponentSource and EnsuredMail have long been the driving force behind innovation and job growth in the industry.
See any pattern there?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Domestically good producers have to pay their half of the worker's FICA taxes. Imported goods do not.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "