[News] Microsoft Pressure Groups Push for Anti-FOSS Laws in Europe
Roy Schestowitz
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Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards
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| Both BSA and ACT have long advocated licenses which allow the use of
| specifications with "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" conditions.
| These "RAND" conditions usually require the users of standards to pay a fee,
| or reciprocate in another way. Those who advocate free software consider
| these conditions incompatible with the open source principle.
|
| Jan Wildeboer is an open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe who supports
| the plans for the revised EIF version. He explained, in an interview with
| heise online, "Particularly the stipulation that presumed intellectual
| property has to be made available without the payment of license fees in open
| standards complies with a fundamental requirement for open source developers
| and providers of open source solutions." He said open standards are generally
| a "vital component of modern IT infrastructures", and was surprised that the
| BSA renewed its call for license fees to be paid for HTTP and DHCP. Wildeboer
| said this argument has already proved redundant in the debate about software
| patents.
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The Microsoft 'legalised bribery machine' is hard at work around this
so-called "independence" day.
Recent:
Microsoft’s 4th EU SME Day | Programme
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| Fighting for Europe’s Community Patent
|
| The European Commission is again gearing up to launch support for a community
| patent. Association of Comeptitive Technologies (ACT) to explore where
| entrepreneurs can directly communicate to policy makers why a community
| patent must succeeed and what it should look like.
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http://smeday.eu/2008/smeday/programme.htm
Related:
Leaked letter warns of open source 'threat to eco-system'
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| leaked letter to the European Commission has revealed the extent of
| lobbying by proprietary software groups to prevent the widespread
| adoption of open-source software.
|
| Sent in response to a recent report on the role of open-source
| software in the European economy, Microsoft-funded pressure
| group, the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) warned of
| potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given
| to open source software development.
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http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=7109
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