Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production

Picking up on Braden’s recent post, “Abuse of Power? Competition Commissioner that Pushes ‘Smart Business Decisions,’” it’s no secret that Europe’s software industry is years behind Microsoft, and not surprising the industry is seeking help from politicians in Brussels.

When Kroes, a politician, talks about open standards one must assume she is referring to the European software industry, not to the open source movement generally. Of course, for the moment “the enemy of my enemy [may be] my friend,” as they say.

In her remarks last week Kroes said,

“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

This statement could be read either as an innocent statement of personal opinion, or more like an informal, unofficial statement of official policy with plausible deniability. I suspect it is the latter, and that if you are a European bureaucrat or business leader you now understand what is expected of you as far as your future software procurement is concerned.

Why would Kroes need to be opaque? Because there are both structural (e.g., excessive tariffs, unreasonable licensing terms, etc.) and nonstructural trade violations (e.g., certain winks and nods) which are actionable. And because two or more can play this game.

A good reason for governments to not encourage boycotts of foreign goods is because foreign governments can do the same thing. That can lead to trade war, in which your efforts to protect one of your small, insignificant struggling industries may result in foreign retaliation against your most successful exporters.

Trade wars don’t always have serious repercussions, but they have sparked global recessions and many think a trade war sparked the Great Depression.

That’s another good reason why maybe politicians on both sides of the Atlantic ought to leave software procurement decisions up to the marketplace.

SHARE: 20 comments

“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed. No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

The above proclamation is from Neelie Kroes, the EU’s Competition Commissioner, as reported in the New York Times. And it seems odd–perhaps even an abuse of the position–for a regulator charged with enforcing competition rules to advocate for one business model over another.

First of all, the world is not so simple as “open” or “closed.” Most software has both open and closed elements, and thus falls along a linear spectrum of being more open or more closed (or proprietary). But politicians, we know, will often eschew nuance and speak in simple rhetoric. And what rhetoric it is!  No citizen should be forced or ENCOURAGED to choose a “closed technology” — this is more befitting of the Free Software Foundation or any NGO, just not a government’s chief antitrust official.

On a related point, I’d like to refer you to a blog post by Noah Clements, who is a guest on the ACT blog. He’s an attorney and former computer programmer, and he recently discussed why governments should not choose technology standards:

First, it is simply too easy to bet on the wrong horse.  A prominent developer, John Sowa, summarized this idea as the “law of standards”:  “Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.”

Second, and a point that flows from the first, even when you choose the best option available, that option will not be the best for long, nor will it be the best solution for all problems.

I invite you to read the rest of his post.

SHARE: 8 comments