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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."
I fought against the BSA when I opposed a proposal for an EU software patent directive. I don't mean to support all aspects of their letter, but I would like to draw some more attention to the fact that the EU "open standards" lobby isn't perfectly credible.
Three months ago I wrote about the open hypocrisy of companies such as IBM, Google, Oracle and Red Hat. Since I wrote that blog post, lots of new things have happened and become known: the European Commission felt forced to launch two parallel antitrust investigations, one of which relates to IBM's refusal to provide interoperability; Oracle sued Google over seven Java patents; later Google and Oracle accused each other of hypocrisy; now Oracle has thrown out the founders of LibreOffice from its OpenOffice mailing list; and Red Hat doesn't appear to comply with LSB 4.0. So much for "open standards" when those companies -- the primary backers of the EU open standards lobby -- are concerned...
What's worse is that the proponents of "open standards" don't tell the truth as far as the compatibility of FOSS licenses with patent licenses is concerned. Such licenses as the Apache license, BSD licenses or the EUPL (European Union Public License) don't contain any language that could be understood to prevent a software publisher/distributor/user from doing a license deal with a patent holder. The only family of licenses where that scenario is addressed is the GPL. GPLv3 isn't relevant, and GPLv2 contains some language that's clearly unable to prevent such arrangements as the Novell-Microsoft partnership (announced four years ago and still not challenged formally by anyone). Even the early drafts of GPLv3 wouldn't have blocked the Novell-Microsoft kind of patent deal, as Richard Stallman admitted at the time. Also, there are plenty of examples of companies distributing GPLv2-based software and paying patent royalties, including Red Hat, TomTom, HTC, LG, Samsung...
So even though one may very well believe (and I'm known for that position) that software should preferably not be patentable, it's disingenous to claim that FOSS licenses prohibit inbound patent licensing. It happens all the time, and there's increasing awareness for that fact in the EU, which makes those who spread lies or grossly misleading statements look pretty bad.
One of the organizations lobbying alongside the likes of IBM for open standards, the FFII, has a board member who admitted six months ago that they received significant funding to do their work against OOXML and that he was initially skeptical but, apparently, money overcame his doubts. The FFII of 2010 and recent years isn't anymore the kind of pan-European network that fought against software patents until 2005. It's only a very small group of activists, and some of them appear to act as corporate stooges now.
The "open standards" lobby in the EU purposely confuses people when it talks about "royalty-free" ("RF") access to patents on standards. What they really mean by "RF" is "restriction-free": that's what some of the honest advocates of that position (such as Glyn Moody) make clear whenever they talk about RF.
They try to focus everything on the question of royalties when there are actually other ways in which patent holders can restrict the use of a standard. For example, the Java patent license (part of the Java specifications) is royalty-free but very restrictive (no supersetting, no subsetting, etc.).
Those who now talk only about "royalty-free" hope that they can get some language into the document which they would later interpret as "restriction-free".
I feel that we're 'lucky' to have say, USB as a standard in connectors. It saves an untold amount of time, development and hassle. I think very long and hard before I buy a device these days which doesn't support charging through USB.
Unless your device is made by Apple... then USB is only standard if you use an Apple-approved charger.
wow what drivel. anyone not agreeing with the hippie anti-corporate slashdot juvenile groupthink bullshit on here gets accused of being a shill.
Grow up and get a job, and elave your moms basement kiddo.
Developers write software, and end users pay developers to use the software.
This is perhaps the most egregious impact which mass-produced commercial software has had around the world.
This is akin to the monks in the 12th century sticking all books in a locked room and translating the books into picture form so that the 'end users' could pay to consume the books without having to know how to read. C or C++ should be a language taught in schools next to French, Japanese or English. Now certainly not everyone would write their own software, but at least they would know how to write .. if the case ever came up.
This global computer illiteracy is a fraud on the general public which has been endlessly perpetuated by commercial software producers. Illiteracy has created an enormously long chain of problems that it's about time that letters like this from commercial software producers were publicly given the respect which they duly deserve.