Brian Prentice

I’m gobsmacked. Flummoxed even.

Sometime I run across things I have to read a couple of times just to make sure I’m not hallucinating. A recent set of utterances by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) has been one such case.

It appears that the IIPA have recommended that Indonesia be added to the US Trade Representative Special 301 status, in part, because they are “…endorsing the use and adoption of open source software within government organizations.” Now, so we’re all clear, the annual Special 301report, according to Intellectual Property Watch;

“…unilaterally evaluates US trading partners on the effectiveness and adequacy of their intellectual property rights protections to combat counterfeiting, internet and digital piracy, or intellectual property as it relates to health policy.”

In fairness to IIPA, this was one of several issues that drove their recommendation. Although I’m assuming that if it’s important enough to highlight so prominently in a list of grievances it must be important enough for the IIPA to see as a problem in its own right. And that would mean a lot of other countries around the world would fall foul of IIPA’s concerns. Hmm, I wonder if the State of California can be given Special 301 status?

Regardless, you might be scratching your head wondering exactly how a circular endorsing the use of open source software would run a country afoul of the US government’s stated objectives. Well, the answer according to IIPA is because this Indonesian circular:

“…simply weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services, even as it denies many legitimate companies access to the government market. Rather than fostering a system that will allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, it encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations. As such, it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions to meet the needs of their organizations and the Indonesian people. It also amounts to a significant market access barrier for the software industry.”

Oh really? Which software industry is the IIPA referring to exactly? Does that include Red Hat, which by IIPA’s criteria must be an illegitimate software company? Does that include all the American software companies frantically figuring out how to embed open source software into their proprietary offerings? How about cloud computing providers that, by-and-large, rely on open source software for their underlying infrastructure? Let’s not forget about the professional services industry which increasing sees open source as key business enabler. The list goes on.

And pray tell, how does a clearly defined copyright agreement – which is what open source software is predicated on – “…encourage a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value of intellectual creation.”

Here’s a key point that the IIPA seems not to understand. Increasingly a key criterion used in deciding what “the best solution available in the market” actually is, is the absence of entity-specific IP control. And that feature is only available with open source software. This is a massively important issue for governments around the world as they look at a software industry largely dominated by US firms. Furthermore, as I’ve noted before, the failure of US software firms to craft variable global pricing models is an invitation to foreign governments with weak currencies relative to the US$ to craft these policies.

But let’s just parse out this out from the Indonesian Government’s perspective. In order to avoid the ire of the IIPA they will need to avoid the following actions which would seemingly be quite acceptable in the US:

• Use Red Hat Linux in their data centers
• Utilize mySQL in e-government sites
• Run Oracle databases on Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Build government private cloud offerings on anything but proprietary software
• Use Google Chrome, Apple Safari or Firefox to browse the web (each either being open source, or relying heavily on open source components). Even recent version of Internet Explorer are questionable as Microsoft has been making some features available via Creative Commons licenses.

What is striking is how each of these scenarios are clearly not in the best interest of the software industry. And that begs the question – who are the IPAA and why are they presuming to speak on behalf of the software industry?

IIPA appears to be a umbrella organization covering a number of member association like the Association of American Publishers (AAP), The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the controversial Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The only member association that has any meaningful link to the IT industry is the Business Software Alliance (BSA). This is an organization whose primary focus is software piracy. Now, if the BSA is somehow linking open source software to software piracy that is a non sequitor of monumental proportions.

Even worse is the damage that this type of policy advocacy is doing to BSA’s own members’ businesses and reputations. It runs contrary to the open source efforts of some members like Apple and WebKit or Cisco and Etch. It undermines the credibility of some members efforts to embrace open source software and open source principles like Microsoft’s OSI approval of the Ms-PL and Ms-RL licenses. It is detrimental to the long term revenue outlook of members like Intel. And it makes an absolute mockery of the enormous contributions of IBM across many different open source projects.

Like I said…absolutely gobsmacking.

2 Comments »

Category: The Future of Ownership - IP & IT Industry     Tags:

Share