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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.
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
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.