Category: Software

More IP Insanity

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In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

………

“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

t didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:

“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”

The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers’ “best places to work” lists to send out dunning letters.

Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Gold Egg Laying Goose, Meet Axe

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All Microflaccid has left is its office suite, and it appears that they are determined to drive a steak through its heart:

Office 2013 is going to be, for most users, a fairly minor evolution of Microsoft’s flagship productivity suite, except for one little thing: with Office 2013, Microsoft is pitching Office subscriptions to consumers.

 The company has already been courting enterprise users with its Office 365 platform for a little over a year now. There are multiple price tiers, with enterprise users getting some combination of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Web Apps, and the desktop Office suite.

 In addition to these enterprise-oriented offerings, the company today unveiled two non-enterprise plans. For $99.99/year, there’s Office 365 Home Premium, giving Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access, plus an extra 20 GB of SkyDrive storage (in addition to the 7 GB that you get for free), plus 60 minutes of Skype calls per month. This is licensed on a per-household basis, and one account can be shared by up to 5 users across any mixture of five PCs and Macs.

 The other new subscription is the $149.99/year Office 365 Small Business Premium. This adds Lync and InfoPath into the software mix, but changes the cloud services. Instead of SkyDrive and Skype, Small Business Premium users will get a 25 GB mailbox, shared calendaring, 10 GB of shared (company-wide) storage, and another 500 MB of storage per user. This is licensed per user, but that user can install on any combination of PCs and Macs, again up to a total of five systems.

Seriously, they lost me with Office 2007.  I use 2003 at home (unfortunately, I use 2010 at work which I really don’t like

I understand that the “cloud” is in right now, but I like the fact that I don’t have to upgrade to whatever clusterf%$# Microsoft feels fit to call an upgrade (see anything with the f%$#ing ribbon).

I’ve been through this sh%$ with Blogger, where they are determined to f%$# with sh%$ that already f%$3ing works.

Seriously, short these morons.

Google Wins

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The judge has now ruled on whether or not the Java API is covered by coopyright, and he said no.

This must be the one of the few federal judges out there who understands programming:

Oracle’s legal battle to break itself off a chunk of the smartphone market by attacking Android looks dead in the water today, after a federal judge who recently finished presiding over the six-week Oracle v. Google trial ruled that the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can’t be copyrighted at all.

It’s only the code itself—not the “how-to” instructions represented by APIs—that can be the subject of a copyright claim, ruled Judge William Alsup. “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API,” wrote the judge.

Google had copied certain elements—names, declaration and header lines—of the Java APIs. Alsup ruled that even though Google could have rearranged “the various methods under different groupings among the various classes and packages,” the overall name tree is “a utilitarian and functional set of symbols, each to carry out a pre-assigned function… Duplication of the command structure is necessary for interoperability.”

………

Alsup compared APIs to a library, with each package as a bookshelf in the library, each class a book on the shelf, and each method a chapter out of a how-to book. “As to the 37 packages, the Java and Android libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters in Android have been written with implementations different from Java but solving the same problems and providing the same functions.” The declarations, or headers, “must be identical to carry out the given function,” wrote Alsup.

Ninety-seven percent of the source code in the API packages is different; it’s only the three percent that overlaps that formed the heart of Oracle’s copyright claim. That three percent included packages, methods, and class names. But those declarations—like starting a function with package java.lang—can only be used in certain ways. “In order to declare a particular functionality, the language demands that the method declaration take a particular form,” notes Alsup (emphasis in original).

Alsup’s ruling comes less than a month after a European court made a decision along the same lines, finding that programming APIs can’t be copyrighted because it would “monopolize ideas.”

Judge Alsup gets it.

He understands the basic concepts, and he understands computers.

I am pleasantly surprised.

Google Did Not Infringe Java Patents

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The jury has ruled that Oracle’s patents were not infringed by Android:

Google on Wednesday was cleared of charges that it had infringed Oracle’s Java patents, ending the second major phase of the trial.

“Today’s jury verdict that Android does not infringe Oracle’s patents was a victory not just for Google but the entire Android ecosystem,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Oracle, however, did not concede defeat. “Oracle presented overwhelming evidence at trial that Google knew it would fragment and damage Java,” an Oracle spokesperson said via email. “We plan to continue to defend and uphold Java’s core write once run anywhere principle and ensure it is protected for the nine million Java developers and the community that depend on Java compatibility.”

Oracle filed its lawsuit against Google last August and the trial began in mid-April. Oracle initially talked about $6 billion in damages. At the moment, it appears Oracle is unlikely to win enough to cover its legal costs.

All that’s left is the whether or not Java’s API, basically the standards for interoperability, are copyrightable.

The jury didn’t rule on this, they could not come to a conclusion on fair use, and they were instructed by the judge to assume that the API is copyrightable. The judge will decide these matters of law, the jury was to rule on matters of fact.)

It appears from the Slashdot discussions that the judge actually made an effort to understand the technical issues, so his ruling should be interesting.

Jeebus, They Are Claiming that API’s are Copyrightable?

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That appears to be the jury ruling in the Oracle-Google lawsuit:

In what could be a major blow to Android, Google’s mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law.

But the jury couldn’t reach agreement on a second issue—whether Google had a valid “fair use” defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week.

The results aren’t clear going forward. Both sides are going to write briefs arguing how to proceed from here, with Google likely arguing the verdict needs to be thrown out, while Oracle somehow tries to hang on to its win on question 1A, the fundamental question about whether Google infringed copyright.

No one knows the jury’s internal deliberations, so it’s speculative to guess at what led to the partial verdict. But one reason could be the unusual construction of this trial. Judge William Alsup, who is overseeing the case, ruled that the case would be decided by a jury of 12, which is large for a civil case and increases the possibility of having one or more “holdout” jurors. Alsup also ruled that the jury must decide unanimously, a requirement for criminal cases that’s not always imposed on civil juries.

Now let’s be clear here: The judge apparently instructed the jury to assume that APIs are copyrightable, in order for them to make decisions about the facts, but that decision will actually be rendered by the judge later. (Yeah, the law is a bitch)

Speaking as a non-lawyer and non-computer programmer, if this stands, it stands a very good chance to shut down much of the software industry in the United States, because any supplier of a platform, at any time, on the machine that you owe, could ban, or demand usurious licensing fees, for any 3rd party software.

So Microsoft could demand fees from (for example) Open Office in order to run on Windows.

In any case, the substantive ruling is the judge’s and that is clearly subject to appeal, you appeal on the law, not the adjudicated facts, so the final decision will likely be either the court of appeal of SCOTUS.

Yet another example of just how %$#ed up our IP system is.

I have a Cat Infestation

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No, really.

The cat that beat me up when I attempted to adopt it has apparrently found a way to transit into the house, and score food from the cat dishes in the basement.

I’ve got to figure a way to co-opt it, because in a conflict, mano a gato, it will kick my butt, because it already has.

Catnip, I need lots of catnip.

BTW, this is the first time that I’ve ever used Windows Live Movie Maker.

This is chapter 3 of the tale of RP the Cat.

Sergey Aleynikov Freed

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You may recall that he was convicted under the Economic Espionage Act for downloading some high frequency trading software from Goldman Sachs, where he worked.

Apparently, the judge in the trial completely bought into the prosecutions expansion of the law, intended to prosecute people for selling military secrets to the Chinese, to this case, and the appellate court came down hard on the judge. They did not just remand this back to the lower court, they ordered the lower court to enter a judgement of acquittal.

Felix Salmon explains why whole case was such an outrage:

The secrets at defense contractors, of course, are secret for reasons of national security. The secrets at investment banks and hedge funds, by contrast, are secret purely for reasons of profit: they reckon that if they have some clever algorithm which nobody else has, then that makes it easier for them to profit from it. Which is why it was always a stretch for the government to use the EEA to prosecute Aleynikov — indeed, it is why it was always a stretch for Aleynikov to be criminally prosecuted at all. Goldman could have brought a civil case against him, but instead they got their wholly-owned subsidiary, the U.S. government, to come down on him so hard that he ended up with an eight-year sentence. Violent felons frequently get less.

The forthcoming decision from the Second Circuit is likely to be a doozy; I’m told that the judges shredded the prosecutors during the oral hearing. And certainly their decision to enter a judgment of acquittal, rather than any kind of retrial, is a strong indication that they handed down this order with extreme prejudice against prosecutorial overreach.

(emphasis mine)

This has been a lose-lose for the Vampire Squid. They looked like bullies, they brought a lot of attention to the bit of front-running that is high frequency trading, and they have now lost the case.

That being said, I don’t expect Goldman, or the prosecutors, to give up just yet.

Background here.

Cyberwar Is the New Profit Center

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Seriously, we are seeing yet another hyped up bit of pants-wetting terror in order to create another way for defense contractors to rip the taxpayers off:

In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass “legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber threats.” The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated, comprehensive legislation.

The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an immediate risk of national disaster.

wired guest column“Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”

Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.

Every so called case of a major attack on meat-space infrastructure has turned out to be false, but we’re gonna spend billions on it.

Am I the Only One to Call False Flag?

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Symantec with an assist from the FBI, is now alleging that a group of hackers stole the source code for pcAnywhere and attempted to shake them down for $50,000.

OK, I get that. But what I doubt is the claim, coming from either the software firm, or the boyz in the Hoover building, that the miscreants are, “group of hackers associated with Anonymous and AntiSec.”*

As MP at the Stellar Parthenon BBS observes, “Anyone claiming to be raising funds in any way on behalf of Anonymous is about as kosher as bacon-wrapped shrimp.”

I have no doubt that Symantec got hacked. I’ve suffered with their software at a number of work places, but my sense is that any mention Anonymous is something that the FBI spent a lot of time manufacturing.

After all, it looks much better in a personnel file at annual review time.

*Tin foil hat. When I originally read the first article, there were constant mentions to anonymous, and now they are all gone.

Don’t Use Download.com

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Seriously.  They have taken to bundling malware with their download installers:

From: Fyodor
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2011 14:35:30 -0800

Hi Folks. I’ve just discovered that C|Net’s Download.Com site has
started wrapping their Nmap downloads (as well as other free software
like VLC) in a trojan installer which does things like installing a
sketchy “StartNow” toolbar, changing the user’s default search engine
to Microsoft Bing, and changing their home page to Microsoft’s MSN.

The way it works is that C|Net’s download page (screenshot attached)
offers what they claim to be Nmap’s Windows installer. They even
provide the correct file size for our official installer. But users
actually get a Cnet-created trojan installer. That program does the
dirty work before downloading and executing Nmap’s real installer.


At least, there is symmetry

Note that the author of this post is also the author of Nmap, and this violates his license.

Here’s some more background.

The fact that they (CNET/Download.com) also employ “Draw by Crayon Libertarian” Declan McCullagh, who is still proud of creating the “Al Gore created the Internet” lie provides a book end for this crap.

I’m not suggesting a boycott here.  I’m suggesting that CNET, and more specifically Download.com, has crossed a line and is now a purveyor of malware.

It’s just not me saying this, it’s, “Panda, McAfee, F-Secure,” (top link) who are classifying their wrappers as spyware.

The Vaporware Beast Has Been Slain!

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In 1998, the much delayed sequel to the fantastically popular first person shooter Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem Forever, was declared one of the top pieces of vaporware (promised but not delivered software) of all time.

Well, an era has ended because today, Duke Nukem Forever was released:

Even though his game is finally in stores, Duke Nukem will forever be remembered as the very personification of vaporware.

Wired.com created the Vaporware Awards many years ago to honor products that were hyped, promoted and promised but never released. Tech and gaming companies love to throw smoke and mirrors in our faces and make us think that barely begun (or simply imaginary) products are humming along quite smoothly; the Vaporware Awards attempt to cut through the spin.

Duke Nukem Forever was mentioned in our Vaporware Awards 12 times as the developers of the first-person shooter let years upon years go by without shipping the game.

Released Tuesday for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, Duke Nukem Forever doesn’t live up to the years of hype. But simply shipping the unshippable game should be counted as an accomplishment for 2K Games and Gearbox Software, which stepped in last year to get Duke back on track after the collapse of developer 3D Realms.

The reviews are mixed.  The gaming press hates it, but at least one person, Bladesmith on the SP BBS, commented that, “Seriously, the reviewers don’t get the joke. This is a throwback AND an homage to the old school 80s Duke.”

As for me, I won’t be getting it.  I never played the original, so I think that I would not get the humor.

Prosecution Doing Back-Flips For Goldman Sachs in High Frequency Trading Trial

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If there was any doubt that the federal prosecutors in New York prosecuting Sergey Aleynikov for theft of trade secrets weren’t in Goldman Sach’s Pocket, those doubts have been allayed:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has always closely guarded the secrets of its lucrative high-speed trading system. Now the securities firm is getting a help from an unusual source: federal prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan this week asked a federal district judge to seal the courtroom at the forthcoming trial of a former Goldman computer programmer accused of stealing the firm’s computer code. The move was a formal request to empty the courtroom of the general public when details of Goldman’s trade secrets are being discussed. The trial is set to start to late November.

Prosecutors also asked that any documents related to Goldman’s trading strategies remain under seal.

Such requests are common when proprietary corporate information could be exposed in a trial, lawyers say. This case is unusual in that it involves secrets about a potentially lucrative trading system, rather than, say, ingredients in a soda formula.

What is also unusual is that this code is almost certainly obsolete, and almost certainly has no value to a competitor.

The software almost certainly has to be updated regularly, probably monthly, possibly weekly, which means that the algorithms and code are almost certainly obsolete, but still they want the court sealed.

This is not about protecting trade secrets, this is about concerns by the vampire squid* that if the details on how they conducted business came out, they would have people calling for their scalps for front-running the markets.

Basically, Goldman, and the prosecutors, are trying to conceal activity by Goldman that is either illegal, or would lead to changes in regulations that would make it so if the details came out.

My earlier posts on this are here.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Sergey Aleynikov Gets One Count Dismissed

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He is accused of stealing Goldman Sachs’ proprietary high frequency trading software, but one of the three counts against him, for unauthorized computer access, has been dismissed.

I’ve always maintained that HFT is actually illegal front-running, or at least it was illegal before Treasury Secretary Robert “Why am I not in jail?” Rubin got his hands on the regulatory regime, and as such, I have always wondered if there was a cover-up of some kind, seeing as how the prosecutors have admitted that this code could be used to manipulate the markets.

A twist in the case that I was unaware of was that Sergey is not the only one the Feds are going after on this, as, “Two months after Aleynikov’s indictment, prosecutors charged former Societe Generale trader Samarth Agrawal with stealing computer code used in high-frequency proprietary trading in the French bank’s New York office.”

I am beginning to think that there is an official policy of allowing “systemically important” banks to skim profits from the markets in order to bolster balance sheets that are far shakier than has been revealed, but they want to keep this technology out of the hands of the small fry, because it would make the flash crash look like a weenie roast if too many people got their hands on this technology.

Background here

A True American Hero

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Colonel Lawrence Sellin, US Army Reserve, who published a blistering critique of the “PowerPoint Ranger” culture within the military in Afghanistan, and was then promptly fired and kicked out of Afghanistan.

This is not surprising. When one publishes an OP/Ed which contains gems such as this:

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.

It ain’t good for career prospects.

In fact, the phrase, “Cognitively Challenged Generals,” used in a publicly published opinion piece, is pretty much a letter of resignation for any member of the military.

Still, it mirrors my experience with FCS, were the generals seemed tremendously concerned about the consistency of colors between variants of the manned ground vehicle in the presentations.

If I were SedDef, I would be tempted to place an immediate and absolute ban on the software.

I’m Not Sure if This is Real, or Just a Corporate Pissing Contest…

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But Google is ditching Microsoft® Windows® completely. No one in the enterprise is going to be allowed to have it on their company machines anymore:

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

“Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,” said another.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Obviously with a bit more than 10,000 employees, one would assume that there somewhere around 20K licenses floating around, which is a small part of Microsoft’s market, but it’s also a poke in the eye.

Obviously, Google will move its employees to its online apps Google Docs at some point in the future, which might be a greater threat to Bill Gates’s revenue streams

I Suppose that this Was Inevitable

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Could it be ………… Satan?

GameStation, a UK video games retailer, has entered the final frontier of click-through licensing, it has added ownership of users immortal souls as one of the conditions of the agreement:

Popular UK video games retail company GameStation has claimed that the retailer legally owns the ‘immortal souls’ of thousands of online shoppers thanks to a clause in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ documents, which, sadly most customers don’t read before purchasing an item online.

GameStation reported that, as a part of the April Fool’s day gag, the retailer changed the online ‘Terms and Conditions’ form and added the so-called ‘Immortal Soul’ clause, which read that “By placing an order via this web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul.”

Unsurprisingly, very few people notices, and very few opted out of this requirement:

GameStation also offered customers a chance to reclaim their souls by clicking on the ‘opt out’ button at the end of the document.

However, out of the 8500 customers that visited the retail site on that day, only 12 percent of them managed to read the ‘Immortal Soul’ clause and swiftly saved their souls from damnation by opting out.

I think that it is clear that to the degree that Satan exists in the manner of Zoroastrian/Christian concept,* he is kicking himself for not having come up with this earlier.

*The idea of Satan being an entity in direct opposition to God is largely a Zoroastrian concept, which was adopted by Christianity. In Judaism, Satan is a title which means adversary, though perhaps a better translation is prosecutor, and is more the inclination to do evil than the guy with the horns and tail.

Software Design that is Bad Stupid Bordering on Criminal

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OK, my wife has a domain for her special education business, SEDRA, and it comes with email.

Yesterday evening, we started getting timeouts when trying to send mail. Receiving worked just fine.

We finally discovered that the registrar and host, HostMonster, had changed the configuration to prevent virus infected machines from spamming. They changed the port used from 25 to 26.

OK, no big deal, it took me 5 minutes talking with tech support to figure that one out.

Unfortunately, there appeared to be no way to change the port number in Eudora®.

So I used Microsoft Mail to change the port, and I could post from that, but not from Eudora®, because it was not available in the options.

Well, I thought that this was stupid, how can you not be able to change the SMTP port in an email program?

Obviously, we could go to a new client, but that would mean hand holding Sharon* through learning a new email client, something that I view with no small amount of dread. I hate being the family call to Bangalore.

So, I Google, figuring that there is probably a setting in the .ini file that I can tweak

What do I find? I find this:

Eudora for Windows

Eudora has chosen to hide the Port change option in version 6.0 and up, making it more difficult to make this change. If you have purchased Eudora, we would suggest contacting them about making this option available by default again. To enable changing ports:

  1. Navigate to your Eudora install directory.
  2. Look in the Eudora directory for the directory “extrastuff”.
  3. In this directory is a file named “esoteric.epi”. Drag (copy or move) this file into the main Eudora directory. There will now be options extra listed, including a Ports page.

[they neglect to mention that you have to restart Eudora here if it is already open]

To change the outgoing mail port from 25 to 26:

  1. Launch Eudora
  2. Drop down the Tools menu, and choose Options
  3. Click on Ports
  4. Change the port from 25 to 26
  5. Click OK
  6. Restart Eudora

So, they had scrupulously hidden these options, and required you to manually move a file in order to be able to access these options.

Not only that, this was not an oversight, it was a deliberate decision to change the program so that you had to do this, and they made this decision when ISPs are increasingly moving away from ports 110 (incoming) and 25 (outgoing) so as to deal with botnets.

I can understand putting this under “advanced”, and popping up a warning, as Firefox does with “about:config”, or perhaps requiring someone to set “advanced menu mode.” or somesuch but deliberately burying the features and requiring that someone track down this obscure fix which involves moving an extensions file to the home directory of the account is stupid.

Actually, it’s more than stupid, it’s stoopid, really, really, really stoopid.

This is a level of deliberately stoopid that makes Sarah Palin look like Albert Einstein.

In any case, I found the fix, and I implemented it, and it works, but it took about 6 hours more than it should have.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

So Now, Open Source is Piracy

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These are your friends

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a private group which is the demon spawn of the RIAA, the MPAA, and other evil organizations referred to by their acronyms, has submitted recommendations to the State Department for countries to be placed on a watch list for ineffective protection of IP, a so called “Special 301” list, and one of their criteria is now encouraging the use of open source software:

I am neither surprised nor upset by the addition of Costa Rica to the list, to be fair our enforcement is atrocious. Similarly, I am not surprised by most of the other recommendations, which seems like a rehash of past offenders. What I found rather surprising is that the IIPA seems to be using their Special 301 submission to attack open source software. According to Digital Copyright Canada, several countries are being included in the Special 301 watchlist because they have open source-friendly policies, or in their words, the IIPA would rather people “pirate” than switch to legal competitors.

This is quite a claim, so I have been going through the reports to verify it myself. The country reports for Brazil, India, Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand certainly contain some comments about open source software. Particularly, the IIPA seems to be concerned that these countries have enacted or are in the process of enacting legislation that will make it obligatory for public entities to choose open source software over its proprietary counterparts. I have to admit that I somewhat share the IIPA’s concerns in this regard. I have never believed in open source procurement legislation, I think that forcing institutions to use a specific technical solution is wrong. Open source is an organic, bottom-up movement, and making it state policy seems not only counter-productive, but contrary to the very same principles of openness. Open source should not be imposed, it should win on its own merits.

Here is what the IIPA says:

“While IIPA has no issue with one of the stated goals of the circular, namely, “reducing software copyright violation,” the Indonesian government’s policy as indicated in the circular letter instead 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.”

Let’s see, the countries are saying that as a matter of policy, free and open is cheaper, and reduces the risks of violation of IP rules, which could result in US sanctions, so as a matter of policy, wherever possible, go with software that carries a “public license.”

According to the IIPA, that’s the same as piracy.

There is no right for private firms to demand that anyone buy their products, particularly not sovereign governments.