EU survey on Free Software and standards: make your voice heard!

 The Free Software Foundation Europe is calling on European Free Software
 businesses to participate in a survey of business attitudes
 towards the acceptability of including patents in industry standards.
 
 The survey [http://projects.isi.tu-berlin.de/ipr/eso/survey.php] is
 a key component of a study that will play the major role in the
 EC's reform of standardisation policy. It is open for submissions until 
 September 17.
 
 A major theme in the survey is whether patents that cover standards 
 should be licensed royalty-free (the W3C [fn:1] takes this
 approach), or whether they should instead be licensed under so-called
 "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms" (FRAND) [fn:2].
 
 FRAND is a misnomer as the terms are neither fair nor reasonable, nor
 non-discriminatory - either for Free Software or indeed for anyone
 other than the small circle of the very largest players in the
 software market.
 
 FSFE's President Karsten Gerloff says: "For Free Software, these
 terms are disastrous as well as discriminatory to the point of
 exclusion. They require royalties to be paid per copy, which makes it
 impossible to distribute a program as Free Software - an obvious
 nonsense."
 
 A second theme in the survey is the question of which standardisation
 organisations should receive official recognition. Should only those
 standards that come out of organisations like ISO be recognised, or
 should governments also accept standards that come out of industry
 fora and consortia?  Typically, the decision processes in fora and
 consortia are somewhat more friendly to Free Software than those of
 formal standardisation organisations, where established interests are
 usually deeply entrenched.
 
 It is of critical importance that as many Free Software companies as
 possible respond to this survey, so that their views are heard and
 form part of the data for the study. The implicit assumptions of the
 survey are, unfortunately, biased towards large corporations with
 dedicated 'standardisation employees'. This makes it all the more
 important that Europe's Free Software companies speak up for
 themselves.

"We need to make sure that the data gathered in this survey will
reflect the actual needs of European businesses", says Karsten
Gerloff. "Don't allow our common interests to be ignored!"




* Footnotes

[fn:1] World Wide Web Consortium, http://www.w3.org/

[fn:2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRAND