Glyn Moody has an excellent blog entry on Microsoft's EU lobbying. It shows the way that Microsoft is rewriting EU policy documents to destroy, as far as it can, open source. The complete document can be found at the excellent Wikileaks.

Most telling, to me, are the passages that Microsoft deleted from the original document:

Over the past years it has become clear that specific patent licensing schemes, most importantly the so-called "RAND" 7 terms, discriminate against OSS implementation. This issue complicated the recent antitrust cases in Europe and was subject of a specific workshop on "IPR in ICT standardisation" 8 organised by DG Enterprise.

The workshop revealed a fundamental incompatibility of RAND models with OSS implementations, as well as a very controversial debate around this issue. From the perspective of OSS adoption,9 it could be said that RAND conditions fall short of the Common Patent Policy of ITU-T, ITU-R, ISO and IEC, which states that "a patent embodied fully or partly in a Recommendation | Deliverable must be accessible to everybody without undue constraints."

[...]

A recent development, which deserves the careful attention from the Commission, is the use of unsubstantiated threats of intellectual property rights infringements against those who attempt to develop interoperable software products. As an example, a major software company has publicly stated that it believes Linux and other open source software infringes 235 of its patents, but has never identified any of these patents.

Vague claims by patent holders that open source software may infringe their patent rights should be obliged to identify supposedly infringed patents or cease to make unsubstantiated allegations. This would prevent patents from being invoked to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt ("FUD") against open source software products in the minds of both developers and users. The behaviour of creating FUD against open source software solutions should not be tolerated, as it amounts to an anticompetitive strategy aimed at distorting conditions in the marketplace to the detriment of OSS products.

Here the original EU document clearly references the actions of Microsoft and its minions. Microsoft removed any reference to its actions.

These developments are clearly very serious for FOSS. Making these documents and Microsoft's methodology widely known is the only way to fight back. Please pass these links on.

Red Hat Certified Technician & Engineer (RHCT and RHCE) Training Guide and Administrator's Reference

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