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Leaked Letter — BSA Pressures Europe To Kill Open Standards
An anonymous reader writes "The Business Software Alliance is trying to kill open standards. Free Software Foundation Europe has gotten hold of a letter in which the BSA tries to bully the European Commission into removing the last traces of support for open standards from its IT recommendations to the public sector. FSFE published the BSA's letter (PDF), and picked apart its arguments one by one."
The documents the BSA is complaining about apparently give preference to "open specifications" that don't have the complication of software patents, that are freely implementable without licensing fees, etc. They aren't saying that software or standards with software patents and licensing fees are excluded from competition, only that the open ones are given preference over ones that aren't.
It's all about saving money and avoiding unpleasant surprises (patent trolls) after a standard is deployed. What the hell is wrong with that?
While it's easy to laugh at optimistic young people that want to "make the world a better place," I have nothing but total disdain and condemnation for those that want to make it worse.
I'm looking at you BSA and cell phone makers that use weird plugs.
That doesn't mean only open source can participate, it means if you're not willing to waive your patent protections your products can't be included in the specs. There's nothing in the rule that prevents closed source from participating except their own short-sighted greed.
Wow, talk about a sense of entitlement. Change the rules so we can play the way we want to or we're going to take our toys and go home.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This rise of stupid patents (to build legal ammunition) makes me think of the rise of stupid research papers (to build academic CV).
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Any royalty above zero is inherently discriminatory against small companies and startups. The FSF correctly point out that the amount of capital needed to start a software company is very small, so having to pay a royalty on top of that significantly increases the amount of capital needed. This is just an attempt by large companies to maintain their monopolies and prevent competition from even entering the playing field.
Well, it's far better than every other place on the planet, including the US where every government just sits, rolls and begs when the BSA ask them.
Lets hope their letter is already correctly tagged "-1 Troll" in EU parliament. Actually BSA has positive side-effect in Europe. Many people, like me, entered politics thanks to assholes like them. I joined Green Party to fight this scum and actually find out that IT-aware "departments" of political parties are quite small, so few informed people can influence not only party politics but also government (if/when that party is in government). Look at German greens, there popularity is skyrocketing. I bet quite few percent are young people pissed by Internet and free SW restricting lobbyist groups. Especially BSA.
839*929
Speaking of corporate stooges, I'm pretty sure you are paid by Microsoft. The amount of attacks you make on a company seem directly related to how much they contribute to the open source ecosystem.
The BSA, just as their brethren the RIAA and MPAA, lie and deceive to press their clients' agenda. Open standards are to the benefit of all and that should be clear and easy to see for even the uninitiated. Open standards are very similar to units of measure in this respect and we can all imagine what things would be like if we didn't operate from the same ones... even worse if a third party controlled the meaning and use of those standards of measure. (weak analogy, I know, but easy enough for the layman to understand)
Credible? Who cares at this point. EU is the last barrier holding corporations like Adobe, Oracle or Microsoft from openly suing and wipping most of FOSS projects. Software patents are evil, period.
Also check out the instant +5. Campaigning on /. is unethical.
Florian Mueller is a professional PR man, advocate of Orwellian-named (F)RAND licensing and OOXML. In case anybody here doesn't know (unlikely), OOXML is Microsoft's misleadingly-named attempt to lock in the world's official documents. The fight against it was the good fight; only the most deluded and the paid disagree. Florian is the "corporate stooge" here.
He is not a friend of FOSS. He is a paid advocate for Microsoft's and the BSA's policy goals.
Never too late to change, Florian. Tell everyone who you work for, call off the mod brigade, do something good. This is not an abstract or esoteric debate to most of us here, it affects our lives directly. Leave the technology policy to us, go play soccer or something.
ISO standards are in principle open as well (well, they more or less were until Microsoft showed us just how easy it is to bribe leadership, but I digress). Following the BSA logic, this should prevent competition.
Just how many different makes of child seats are there? Should we stop this too? And the checking of how secure they are according to OPEN specifications that can be validated for quality?
These people are *so* blinded by their desire for control that they don't just ignore the collateral damage they cause, they actively don't care. Let's give them the benefit of their idea of "innovation" and send them to live in caves to write their next memo on a stone with a blunt chisel.
Insert
Seldom do profit and "best for country" align.
The BSA is a sponsored organization - sponsored by payments from commercial software makers. It works on their behalf and in their interests. The BSA also allows the commercial software makers to avoid getting their company shown in a negative light as they fight against anything that would reduce profits for the sponsor companies.
Open formats reduce profits for commercial software companies because we (our governments) don't need to pay for expensive "consultants" to create integrations. Integrations are where the consulting cash rolls in. Special requests that can be sold over and over again are another way they make money. With free software and open file formats, customers can most easily switch between different softwares and use different vendors against each other. With closed formats, only 1 software can work with the data. That is want the commercial software vendor wants everyone to believe.
The main issue with open specifications is they don't mandate open file/data formats. That means the details of the implementation can be interpreted by different vendors in very different ways, while still complying with the spec. That basically makes each implementation proprietary and achieves what the commercial software makers want.
That is not a way for governments - and all of us - to get what we really want.
Oracle dismissing LibreOffice folks is pretty much what anyone else would do in their shoes. Let's say you have a project X. Some people with relatively less power in your project fork it to project Y, and say they do it because project X sucks. What would you do? Still keep them in project X? Replace X with an organization you head, and this will make more sense. This is the definition of conflict of interest, and the outcome is exactly what happens in such a case.
Banu
Just wanted to point out to those that seem to think that Europe is a single country that the European Union, consisting of 27 member states, of which the European Commission is an institution, is not the same as the European continent and the about 50 sovereign states it comprises.
Who's talking about FOSS licenses?
This discussion is about open standards. And whoever is pushing the open standards (no, it doesn't matter a jot whether it's big blue, redhat, google and what ethical issues they may have or even if they implement the standards properly) the BSA's move here is unethical and just plain wrong.
And please don't mention OOXML opposition in the same ... universe as money and corruption when we all saw how that utter abortion of a non-standard was pushed through.
As an end user and computer user I do not want my data held hostage nor do I want what I can do to be more productive with computer, to be falsely constrained.
I am also very aware just how much the software industry in general applies such hostage situations and false constraints. Open source software has proven itself, the developers of, to be a large improvement in teh direction of users freedom but there is plenty to improve upon, such a development tools and methodologies which allow more end users to automate and create programs.
BSA stands for Bull Shit Association.
If this is their stance, are we not talking about cartel building? With this sort of letter I would be most curious to know just what other actions have taken place behind the scenes to make that BSA stance reality. Or, in plain English: maybe an anti-trust investigation could well be in order..
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http://www.bsa.org/country/BSA%20and%20Members/Our%20Members.aspx
Some pretty big players in overpriced hardware and software in there. Adobe, Microsoft and Quark being three who are big players in proprietary document creation software.
It is fair to point out that the BSA and its member companies operate under an entirely different view of the world than you or I do. In their view of the world, there are two disjoint sets of people: developers, and end users. Developers write software, and end users pay developers to use the software. If a particular team of developers created some software package, the end users are supposed to get their software from that particular team, on whatever terms that team mandates. Open source fits into this by simply allowing lots of developers to collaborate; there is still supposed to be a partition of users and developers.
The BSA folk have trouble with the very concept of libre software; it is a case of "not getting it." The idea that users can share software with each other is foreign to these people, and it goes against everything they believe is true of software development. They have an easier time with "open source," since at least they can still categorize people in a way that is comfortable to them; but when it comes to software freedom, when it comes to actually prioritizing the rights of non-developers, they have trouble with the very concept. "Open source" is something the BSA can compete with, attack, and so forth, because they can wrap their minds around it; "free software," on the other hand, is too different from the world as they understand it, and the best they can do is write it off as "academic."
Palm trees and 8
Good points, but there may be some cases where a file format is actually patented (despite exclusions in patent law).
In that particular situation, I think the EU should actually do what the BSA letter suggests, and refrain from using that particular technology for its public standards. In the probably most relevant field for government bureaucracies, formats for office documents, there is already a good enough open standard in the form of ODF.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Corporate Property Rights (CPR) will be used in an attempt to resuscitate business-corpses of spiritualism, guesses, dogma and voodoo-economics that camouflage legacy cadaver-parts and Luddite-brains as if It's ALIVE! Perpetuating animated zombie economics of exploitation, corruption, hubris, and oppression of humanity with misdirection, fear, and loathing of unknowns and new possibilities for EU & US. CPR is one of the very important sustenances for continuing another century of rule by the brain-dead and blood-sucking flaccid Vampires.
CPR is a trick on EU and US, a treat for the rotting fetid elite-plutocrats sucking and destructing, like a perfect storm, ending all hope for poor pitiable humanity. For another hundred years we are an pwned commodity for war and production to continue feudalism and slavery economics for EU, US, RU,IN, CN.... With advances in robotics the problematic pwned legacy commodity for production can be disposed of by extermination (Plutocrats' autonomous robot military [Drones now, Terminators later]).
Happy Halloween everyone, zombies, Frankensteins, and vampires are not real..., and we will never avenge our dead/selves. So, Boooo MFs
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I am surprised how few people actually know how and by whom the BSA was founded. The "Business Software Alliance" is a shady and like not even legitimate organization that is paid for by the few large commercial software companies. These people are trying to project an "official" image while struggling to keep their facade from collapsing, especially since the latest investigations into their accounting. This is a huge pile of dirt just waiting to be dug up by someone with professional investigative experience or a brilliant hacker leaking their accounting info and personal bribes from a certain software company...
Institutions are supposed to work flawlessly.
But what happened to ISO is like having a dear pet which got rabbies. Can we cure it?
If not and it starts to endanger our democratic ways, maybe it's beyond salvation. Maybe we need new organizations immune to such vicious lobbying and legal actions aimed at removing the citizen rights.
It's a sad state of things when we realize that "the law is hard, but it can be changed with the right amount of pressure/power".
For the record, since I'm a F/OSS supporter, I'm pretty much against copyright violation (the GPL is based on copyright law). Then again, going after users with the excuse of fighting piracy amounts essentially to corruption, literally, of the legal apparatus. This is reason to forcefully close BSA IMHO.
No less.
Wait, fsfe claims "W3C, the standard setting organization (SSO) that governs the Internet standards". Tthe "World Wide Web Consortium" just works on web stuff. The IETF does Internet standards.
You were wondering who is behind the BSA: Complete list of BSA members
... are basically enemies of society as a whole. I think it may be time to contain these evil scum permanently.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sometimes I want to stand out of the way and just watch the patent trolls nuke each other out of existence a la Microsoft-Apple-Motorola. While they are busy squabbling like children in a school yard, the free software movement can take the time to do reverse FUD. The Free Software boulder has already begun rolling full steam ahead and I believe there is little anyone can do to quash it! Even if some of of these lizards manage to get a some new closed stuff standardized, free software will simply write a new, unencumbered protocol. I look at OpenBSD's CARP as an example of free software killing patents!
Anyone else smells a rape lawsuit against Karsten Gerloff?
In its letter, the BSA argues that "[I]f the EU adopts a preference for royalty/patent-free specifications, this undermines the incentives that firms have to contribute leading-edge innovations to standardization - resulting in less innovative European specifications, and less competitive European products."
Firms not contributing to standardization will face being irrelevant! Any firm that does not want to contribute to standardization faces less name recognition as well. Had Microsoft opened its Active Directory protocols from the beginning and sought to make it a standard, all kinds of other products with full compatibility would have been produced and Microsoft would be seen as the reference implementation. Microsoft could have charged large amounts of money for developer support and still business would be buying Windows Server products. Now, arguably, Microsoft is winding down - the victim of its own greed. It's days of being a leader have peaked. In fact, Microsoft is now more of a follower and, instead of a highly custom SIP protocol version, Microsoft simply uses the standard.
In BSA version, Bilbo get in thru the main door, and handles the dragon a letter where he demand all the gold, and that the dragon tie itself and follow all his orders, no magic involved.
It's robber barons time again: society stands to benefit a lot from building a new infrastructure, which naturally some companies and individuals are trying to hijack, monopolize...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I would put more trust in BSA motorcycles, which should never be out after dark, or the Boy Scouts of America than the wretched BSA in question.
That part is in the public domain already.
I see why YOU post anon.
Douchebags all...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
My 1970 BSA Rocket 3 runs very nicely thank you very much. I've had it since new. 210,000 miles with only one top end overhaul. Oh, the lights work very well at night.
Despite all the jokes about Belgian nonexistence and French cowardice the European Commission will never capitulate to bullying.
However flattery, bullshit, and bribery have all been proven to be very effective.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We know who you are and what you're selling. For those who need documents for the assertions in the grandparent post there's always Google or Groklaw. What happened to you? I recall there was a time when most people had respect for you - when you were on the side of progress. Can you remember where you were and who you were with when you sold out? That information would be helpful to those of us who have yet to take that meeting. From the Wiki page it seems the date was some day after July 2006, if that helps. Not so long ago.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Let me put that a nicer way: "Who are you, and what have you done with our Florian?"
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Broken window fallacy. You may as well hire people for the government in two teams: one to dig holes and another to fill the holes in. It means no training needed for the underemployed (the spade is a fairly intuitive interface).
The international association of patent trolls takes offense at any legal moves that complicates the business of their clients.
Really? I always though it took offense at the moves which simplified the business of their non-clients.
Generally speaking, big companies love flat per-company costs, since relative to size it hurts small companies the most. Second to that, they love fixed percentage-of-revenue costs, since it amplifies the per-company flat costs (they're bigger relative to the remaining funds). Searching for patents and getting licensed where appropriate seems to be one of these (or a mixture of the two).
So big companies love patents: it squeezes out all the small companies, which incidentally are vital to a healthy economy (i.e. one in which the involved human beings prosper).
Open standards are very similar to units of measure in this respect and we can all imagine what things would be like if we didn't operate from the same ones...
I can imagine airplanes falling out of the sky. As can Air Canada, if they remember the Gimli Glider incident (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)
You can also hear Dan Klein tell a story about it (and software testing in general) at http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix05/tech/mp3/klein.mp3
They are called Business Software Alliance, not Government Software Alliance.. so they should go back to Business and leave governments alone.