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European Commission Support of FRAND Licenses Hurts Open Standards
jrepin writes "While the UK has seen the light, the EU has actually gone backwards on open standards in recent times. The original European Interoperability Framework required royalty-free licensing, but what was doubtless a pretty intense wave of lobbying in Brussels overturned that, and EIF v2 ended up pushing FRAND, which effectively locks out open source — the whole point of the exercise. Shamefully, some parts of the European Commission are still attacking open source."
Who pays? How do you track the number of distributed copies and pay?
Perhaps that's what the FSF should be working out, instead of pushing GPL v3.
Software patents are nothing like actually collecting rent because they provide no utility to the one paying.
I often chuckle when people justify torrenting movies on the basis that Hollywood movies are so bad these days it's not worth paying for them. The irony that if they were so bad, why are they downloading seem lost on them.
Likewise, if the patented idea has no utility, then don't use it. If it does then pay for it.
If you're Microsoft, Apple, or a proprietary software vendor of any, or a holder of software patents, then yes Open Source and Free Software are "broken" to you.
I'm a proprietary software developer. More to the point, I believe that when people labour towards something that is consumed by others, they should be paid. I don't understand why people here are so desperate to devalue computer programmers so their work is worth nothing.