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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
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.
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
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)
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.
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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.
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.
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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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
You were wondering who is behind the BSA: Complete list of BSA members
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."