IT giants accused of exploiting open source (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports from the Holland Open Source Conference, where European Commission member Jesus Villasante made some comments about the community and business interests. "Villasante argued that open source is vital to the development of the European software industry, but that its progress has been inhibited by pressure from intellectual-property lobbyists and the traditional software industry, and by the fragmentation of the open-source community. 'Open source is a complete mess--many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today,' Villasante said."

to post comments

"People do lots of different things" != "complete mess" || "total confusion"

Posted Jun 1, 2005 22:48 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I love to hear excerpts like this. Everyone is off doing their own thing!
It's chaos! If everyone just did what I told them then things would be
different!

Dude! People do lots of different things because they have lots of different
goals and needs.

As for intellectual property lobbbyists and the software industry pressuring
to inhibit open source; I have no doubt that the buggy whip makers industry
would have done everything in their power to inhibit the rise of the
automotive industry. Those people have different goals and needs, too.

Vacuous.

JimD

European software industry

Posted Jun 1, 2005 23:50 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Mr Villasante would do well to clean up his own house before he starts meddling in the affairs of others. Near the end he says that software patents are the responsibility of a different directorate:

"Firstly, I'm not responsible for software patents--the software-patent directive is managed by the director general of Internal (Market). The opinion of the director general of Information Society (the division where Villasante works) is not necessarily the same as the director general of Internal."

Perfect. So, let not your left hand know what your right hand does, and all that. Bureaucracy at its best: the head of software technologies does not have a say on software patents.

It is true that European companies do not have a tradition of self-motivated donation and collaboration, as HP or IBM do in the US towards free software. Here the public sector has traditionally played that role; so we would like to see the Commission supporting European free software efforts, and less goose-chasing in the form of Framework Programmes. And it works better, too -- Mandriva has recently received a large grant to develop software, helping it compete in the corporate world. I'm sure they will make good use of the money.