European Commission Support of FRAND Licenses Hurts Open Standards 137
jrepin writes "While the UK has seen the light, the EU has actually gone backwards on open standards in recent times. The original European Interoperability Framework required royalty-free licensing, but what was doubtless a pretty intense wave of lobbying in Brussels overturned that, and EIF v2 ended up pushing FRAND, which effectively locks out open source — the whole point of the exercise. Shamefully, some parts of the European Commission are still attacking open source."
Re:FRAND excludes Open Source? (Score:2, Informative)
FRAND patents include per-unit license fees.
How do you pay those on a product you want freely copied by as many people as possible?
Re:The Europe Union is ALL about democracy (Score:4, Informative)
All very good but you forget about the Directives that can be issued by the Commission without the oversight of the Parliament. Said directives MUST be enacted by the member states. End of.
Now how is that Democracy?
Nope. ALL directives must pass through the EP [wikipedia.org].
Re:So much for democracy (Score:5, Informative)
The Commission *is* a technical institution. Its business is to draw up legislation based on general principles and guidelines agreed upon in the European Council (consisting of democratically elected heads of state). Said legislation is usually amended or shot down in either the Council of the European Union (consisting of democratically elected ministers from member states) or the European Parliament (consisting of democratically elected representatives from member states), the latter of which has a final say. It is a damn shame that the European people do not realise how much power the Parliament really has and therefore do not participate at its election nearly as enthusiastically as they should, participation hovering around the 30% mark and if you ask me, such detachment from the matters of the continent is borderline autistic.
The Commission does not decide anything. All it can do in that regard is present its case well enough in front of the Council of the EU and the EP. All those controversial EU regulations that domestic governments sell their people as coming from the Commission (‘and sorry, there's nothing we can do, Barroso told us to stick our heads in the oven’) have actually been then ratified by the governments themselves and by consensus, often because they would not dare pass such legislation at home because it would render them unelectable for quite some time. And most of them have also been called into life by the same local elected officials.
I realise that there is no direct counterpart for the Commission in any of the member states for a direct comparison, but I liken them to the technical and unelected staff at the ministries who nowadays provide most of the legislation in most countries according to the guidelines from elected officials. You don't elect all the administrators and the various specialists and the lawyers who work at ministries. Likewise, you don't elect the Commission. It should remain an independent technical tool to provide legislative proposals that the elected officials could then shoot down if necessary.