THE PRESIDENT of the FFII points out that "Oracle€´s blog post over EIFv2 open standards lobbying has disappeared" and that it can still be found here (titled "The EU goes bananas over EIF 2.0"). What's the matter with all that? Is it possible that Oracle found it unacceptable to defend software freedom and standards (like Sun removed MySQL's anti-software patents page following the acquisition [1, 2])? Here is a portion of what this newer Oracle post about the Digital Agenda says despite the fact that it too has been derailed.
The EU Digital Agenda (I gave it an 85/100 score), while laudable, stops short of using the term. The speech is a nice interpretation of her own document. I am told all other relevant Commissioners saw and accepted the speech in a brief interservice consultation. What that means is another thing. Are they blind? Have they changed their mind? Or, do they simply let her have her own opinions, but were not prepared to go as far as this in the Digital Agenda? Whatever lies behind what happened and what was said today, it is progress.
The next step for the European Commission is defining the term open standards. If they do that, and do it right, Vice President Kroes will go into history as having made a significant contribution towards global progress in e-government by possibly eradicating lock-in forever. Moreover, she will put Europe's SMEs in a better position to succeed in a global IT market filled with barriers to entry from players not fully understanding, using, or unpacking standards.
The largest growing part of the software sector, and which most threatens the legacy business models of BSA members, is the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement. I joined this multi-sectoral movement, which includes but is not limited to commercial software companies, in the early 1990's. Most of the policies promoted by the BSA since the mid 1990's have been aimed at stopping or reducing the growth of this movement. The two most active policies are software patents and legal protection for technical measures.
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Independent software authors have obvious allies with other independent software authors. There is the Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation in the US, and various software user/developer groups in Canada such as CLUE: Canada's Association for Open Source.
If you look at the membership for the Linux Foundation and the BSA, you may notice there are overlapping companies between who I consider to be my most obvious opponents and allies. This is not only true within these associations, but within individual companies. I've observed informal policy debates between employees of IBM, with these different employees being as far as two individuals can be from each other on key areas of technology policy.
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The BSA members are using the labels as their public face to the political process, just as the labels have always used specific famous musicians as their public face. Michael Geist has suggested that the major labels are behind the latest Astroturf campaign, and from what I have seen I suspect this is true.