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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 international association of patent trolls takes offense at any legal moves that complicates the business of their clients. This is what this article is about.
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.
Then we were all happy, because we could develop libre software and buy generic cell phone chargers?
Palm trees and 8
And nothing hurt.
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.
However, the EU could easily solve the patent troll issue when it comes to software: they could simply not recognize software patents.
They don't. Why do you think shits like Microsoft and Apple are always paying off European politicians to vote for them. Durrr!
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
You were wondering who is behind the BSA: Complete list of BSA members
Fortunately, since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect, circumvention of (elected) MEPs by (unelected) Commissioners is not so easy. The European Parliament handed the Commission its ass on a couple of major points very quickly to educate them about the changed situation. If memory serves, ACTA is up this coming week, so it will be interesting to see whether it happens again (though it sounds like most of the really bad parts of that have effectively already been dropped as the by-the-back-door politics failed).
As for software patents, the situation is not as straightforward in Europe as some people describe. There is no Europe-wide formal recognition of "software patents" as some sort of category, but numerous patents have been granted by European nations that you or I might describe as "software patents", and as with most such things, whether they are deemed enforceable isn't something we'll know until the court case comes up, and the potential chilling effects are there anyway.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Did they? My experience tells me it takes a lot more capital and resources to make good software than what most, especially small, companies invest.
Or talent... Throwing money at software doesn't necessarily make it better...
I seem to remember that cellphone chargers in the EU have been standardized to use the mini-USB plug and standard.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
One person companies, maybe. There's more additional cost than you're listing, but overall, you may be right.
But most commercial software projects take more manpower than one or two or three developers can accomplish, and then you will need a project manager to coordinate them. That's where small companies often fail, just by not being willing to invest in one who actually has any clue about management.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Except being whacked by cell phones or garroted with cell phone charger cables...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
It's not that the BSA is trying to save money, and avoid unpleasant surprises when patent trolls try to patent something. It's about the BSA making money. If you ever tried to buy a BSA Standard, you'll know just what I'm talking about. What is a standard? It is a set of "common sense" collaboration of best practices. If it is created by 50 people who all want to make a standard, and they decide to GIVE it away, then simply put a GPL or GNU license on it. In the doctrine of full disclosure, I'm a published author, and a creator of several standards that were provided freely, and are now the basis for many standards that are for purchase.
- just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean I'm not out to get you.
That's how it is supposed to work: anyone can produce software that works with standard interfaces and file formats. Commercial providers are free to compete with each other and customers choose the best products for their own purposes. Whether one product or another is open source is not really relevant.
The problem is that the BSA would much rather discourage the use of open standards. In other words, their member companies are afraid of competing with each other and would rather keep their current market positions, with their existing customers locked in to their proprietary interfaces and file formats.
micro-USB will be a EU standard in January and it seems this is not just a dead-letter law: All major phone manufacturers have already agreed to go along. EU is a market of half a billion people so in practice this _will_ be a global standard, unless some other major market area starts to actively fight this by standardizing on something else.
1. Julius Caesar was reckoned to be a direct descendant of Venus, so, as a divinity himself, he was pretty much right at the head of the "priesthood".
2. There was no "proprietary calendar". There wasn't any kind of useful calendar at all. That's why he needed to create one.
3. He was killed because some people didn't like his dictatorship and wanted to restore the Republic.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat