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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Using a Mercenary

It was Andrew Orlowski who shrewdly noted that the WTO is being used as a front by certain commercial interests in their fight against the free/open source software movement and communities. He suggests that a company like Microsoft may never actually sue anyone for patent infringement, but rather will use government agencies and NGOs to do the dirty work while it holds their coats. He says:

So like Mutually Assured Destruction, the true value of Microsoft's patent arsenal lies in the threat of their use, not their actual use. In any case, what Microsoft seems to be counting on is that the momentum behind the GPL will falter as companies become wary of deploying it.

We've certainly seen this before - the case of the BSA calling in federal marshals at Ernie Ball Music seems to have been a case in point of the same tactic in a different field.

So it should come as no surprise to see those happy agents of all things closed over at IBM & Microsoft's pet CompTIA using the same tactics. (Note: In a large organisation like this you can't be sure all the members support all the policies - sometimes it's better to be working inside for change - but one can make a shrewd guess about the intentions of the directors and their companies) CompTIA is trying to use the WTO to beat F/OSS:

In a complaint letter addressed to representatives of the US government, the software industry claim that "Several governments including China, Brazil, India and Russia are limiting or are threatening to limit the access of US IT companies to their procurement systems. The loss of access to the government procurement markets would be devastating to US interests in these markets."

Now, my experiences in Brazil suggest not that they are "limiting the access of US IT companies to their procurement systems" but rather that they are instituting policies aimed at encouraging those companies to create jobs in Brazil rather than elsewhere with the money the Brazilians are paying. I remembering hearing Gilberto Gil say that for them, the aim was to get $1 of assets for every $1 paid out on software rather than just getting use of a foreign-owned asset. That seems fair enough to me. As the author writes,

In order to get US commerce authorities to support the country’s Information Technology industry, CompTIA argues that the industry generates profits and millions of job opportunities... in the US. “Approximately 10.1 million people in the U.S. earn their livings performing IT jobs,” they say. Defending the access to new markets would mean defending the country’s development in the job and economical sectors. “While these numbers are impressive, the US IT industry believes it can do even more if it has open and fair access to foreign markets,” they justify.

They have forgotten to say that, if the proprietary model is adopted, the IT industry will generate only a few job opportunities in poorer countries, and those will be in management and sales areas. Technology control and development will continue to be restricted to wealthier centers. Which is, for certain, very appealing to commercial representatives in the US.

I've said before that open source keeps the money in the country where it's spent; policies that allow that are the ones to be encouraged.

posted at 1:19 PM (UK) | |