Neelie Kroes: Woman of the Year
It's been a month or so since the agreement between the EU and Microsoft was announced, so there's been a bit of time to consider the implications of the agreement. In brief, Microsoft has agreed to make interoperability information available to open source developers, for a fee of 10,000 euros; furthermore, Microsoft has agreed to license this information, including its patents, at a royalty rate of .4% to commercial companies. Commercial companies have a choice of which of these arrangements they use, depending upon whether they believe a patent license is necessary.
In my view, this agreement is one of, if not the most, significant open source developments of the year.
First and foremost, it frees open source developers from the shadow of litigation, which was always present in the past. Others (including Groklaw) have stated that they feel the 10,000 euros is too high a fee for open source developes. I agree. However, in the context of a commercial software industry, Kroes could hardly demand compulsory free licensing. Not developing under the potential threat of litigation, however, is a huge step forward. Furthermore, I believe that community open source developers will find large, open source-friendly companies (e.g., IBM) willing to fund these fees to further their own interests. Commercial open source companies, of course, can well afford the licensing fees.
This compatibility information, by the way, is what has been behind Microsoft's rather bizarre claim that they are now open source-friendly, because they are "building a bridge" to the open source community. Building a bridge has, to them, always meant implying that their protocols were crown jewels, worth, well, enormous sums from open source developers. Kroes has set a price on the crown jewels at a fee more like paste.
Second, the agreement will smoke out Microsoft's ongoing patent circus, where they incant the term "235 patents" and ask people to pay up for them if they use open source -- all without ever actually identifying the patents in question (I personally would like to play poker this way, too: my hand beats yours, but I'm not going to show you the cards --now shove the pot this way, please). This is based on Microsoft's belief that some open source products infringe on Microsoft's patents. Companies can pay the 10,000 euro fee, and if Microsoft brings up their patents and asks for royalties, can politely refuse to pay the royalties until the patents are identified, thereby gutting Microsoft's patent strategy.
A number of people have commented that this is great, but that it only applies in Europe, so it won't solve any problems in the US. While this may be technically true, it's unlikely that Microsoft is not going to conform its US practices to the EU's -- anything else would be politically untenable.
Overall, everyone involved in open source should salute Neely Kroes. She was willing to persevere in what must have been the face of a siege of lobbying by Microsoft and its cohorts. What she came up with may not be perfect, but in life the perfect is all too often the enemy of the good.
What is Tech Briefcase?
TechBriefcase is a new, free service where IT Professionals can Search, Store and Share IT white papers and content like this. Learn more
Bookmark content
Speed up your research efforts with content across the web.
Search and Store
Find the white papers you need. Create folders for any topic.
View Anywhere
Open your briefcase on your iPhone, tablet or desktop. Share with colleagues.
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
