BSA uses IP card against European Commission

Tag: IP Card

Leave it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to distort the definition of "open standard" in order to serve the interests of Microsoft and its other members. The BSA doesn't like the European Commission's increasing interest in open source and open standards to deliver software interoperability.

As the BSA's European software policy director declared,

They [the European Commission] define open standards inconsistent with the common understanding of the term in what we believe is a dogmatic approach. It fails to recognise that almost all standards that help interoperability and that governments should indeed use to promote the very objectives of the EIF do have intellectual property.

This is a clever shift of the argument, trying to preserve the status quo while it's clear that the European Commission is looking forward to improve interoperability, rather than backward to defend the type of interoperability we've had for far too long. You know, the kind where everyone is forced to interoperate with Microsoft because it controls 95 percent of a market, and can only integrate with closed, poorly documented APIs and protocols.

The European Commission is increasingly realizing that open standards without safeguards like open source are a hollow promise. Interoperability, in turn, depends on such open standards, as Red Hat, for one, has long argued: