Open Standards in Europe: FSFE responds to BSA letter

"It [royalty-free requirement] runs counter to how the ICT sector has defined open standards for a long time." It varies. Many standards organizations have accepted royalty-free as a requirement. Don't destroy our progress there.

"Red Hat is probably the most dishonest one of the proponents of that "royalty-free" dogma. It entered into at least one -- more likely two and possibly even more than two -- patent licensing deals under which it paid royalties to patent holders, still distributes the related software under GPLv2." It's not dishonest if they purchased patent licenses for all downstream recipients of their software.

"If Red Hat can pay royalties to other patent holders, I can't see why it can't do a license deal with MPEG LA." Presumably because MPEG LA, like most other patent holders, won't offer a license that will cover all downstream recipients (at least, not at an affordable price).

"Canonical ships its Linux distribution called Ubuntu with MP3 and several other proprietary formats." No significant free software license, not even GPLv3, restricts "mere aggregation", so any Linux distributor can ship MP3 software without violating licenses. They just can't deliver genuine freedom to their users.

"It doesn't make sense to narrow the debate to an aspect that's actually a non-issue." Royalty requirements --- except for very unusual situations where one licensee can sublicense to all downstream recipients --- destroy software freedom. They are very definitely an issue; you can only declare them a non-issue if you don't care about software freedom. Therefore, I have to conclude that you don't care about software freedom.

I think you owe it to the community to clarify your position here. I think you need to explain to everyone that software freedom doesn't matter to you, and that your only goal is to ensure that we can continue to develop and use software with most of the popular open-source licenses.