Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Wednesday 31 January 2007, 12:13 PM
When Goliath manipulated Goliath
Get this. This is a short chronology of how a rather large software company can influence one of the largest government administrations in the world. I repeat the timeline of events without comment.
Nov 20, 2006 Team of respected academics from the United Nations University in Maastricht, paid by the European Commission, prepares report praising the deployment of open source software. Open source software produces a lower total cost of ownership in 'almost all cases', say the authors.
Jan 12, 2007 European Commission publishes the report on its own site.
Jan 15, 2007 We run an article saying the European Commission has published the report, and we describe some of the contents.
Jan 18, 2007 Microsoft-funded organisation, the Initiative for Software Choice, which is headed by CompTIA, writes to the Commission asking it to address the reporting of the issue in the "international press".
Jan 25, 2007 CompTIA calls us to ask us to distance the European Commission from the report. CompTIA says the Commission is concerned about the article. We decline to react to the lobbying to change the article on the grounds that our article is correct and unbiased.
Jan 30, 2007 The Commission calls us, drawing attention to our article. It keenly stresses its independence and how it is not (apparently) now favouring open source software.
Nice chain of events. The Commission told us it's not being pressurised by anyone. We'll leave it up to readers to make up their own mind.
PreviousComments on this post
As the lead author of the report, I should point out that in all our public interactions as well as the press release at www.flossimpact.eu, we have made clear that the report does not necessarily represent the views of the European Commission (this is the standard disclaimer for any study prepared for the EC). Neither we nor the EC ever suggested that the publication of the report in itself represented any policy decision on behalf of the EC.
To be fair to the "international press", I don't think any policy decision was implied in the news coverage either, except for the occasional misleading headline. But if questions were raised, it's only natural for the EC to restate this position. I should point out that the EC did not "distance itself" from the report, as ZDNet (or CompTIA) might suggest - the EC commissioned the report and published it, and did not (and never planned to) make an immediate policy change. Their recent statement just repeats this.
In defence of the EC, I should add to your change of events the fact that a draft (near-final) version of the report was presented at a public workshop in Brussels on September 28 (see www.flossimpact.eu). There was much heated discussion during the workshop, which led to the EC agreeing to a short period of comments - as stated in the published report itself, on page 14.
Several comments were received, mostly positive. One critical comment from CompTIA (the "Initiative for Software Choice") was leaked to the press (presumably by CompTIA - I believe ZDNet carried the story in October). Over 100 pages of critical comments were also received from or apparently on behalf of a certain company.
Over the next couple of weeks, we revised our report to address the comments, in many cases we were able to strenghten our report thanks to the criticism; we responded to every comment raised, either in the revision or explicitly in a separate response provided to the EC (which they may or may not have forwarded to the organisations concerned). It is commendable that the EC did not give in to the obvious pressure to bury the report and published the revised version without undue delay.
The process of public criticism and response may also be one reason for the relative lack of criticism since the publication of the report. Thanks to how the EC chose to manage the publication, we have already responded to pretty much anything our critics could think of.
