Defending Openness in the European Union

One of the most surprising recent developments in the field of openness has been the rise of Europe as a key player there. This is not the result of some grand plan, despite what the conspiracy theorists in proprietary software companies might think, but simply a natural evolution of the European Union itself, and a consequence of its attempts to become more tightly integrated.
The OOXML fiasco at ISO is perhaps the highest-profile manifestation of this, where a closed, proprietary standard was gradually made to seem open. Here, the “open standard” label represents simply a box that must be ticked to keep that pesky EU and its communistic member states happy, not a real Damascene conversion to fairness and a level playing-field.
The key issue here is that of patents. The EIF rightly insists that everything must be on a royalty-free basis. Opponents of free software and fans of intellectual monopolies - who seem to believe that they have a right to extract licensing fees from what are supposed to be totally open standards - are trying to paint this as discriminatory, when it is exactly the opposite: anything but royalty-free will lock out all open source solutions, which are unable to charge their users. By contrast, proprietary companies can not only function perfectly well with royalty-free open standards, but positively thrive, as the Internet and Web both show.

Forget the Iphone...

Nokia's announcement this week that it would purchase London-based Symbian Ltd.--a cellphone operating system it co-owned with Sony, Ericsson and Samsung, among others--and distribute the once costly software for free.
To oversee that distribution, Symbian is establishing a nonprofit alliance studded with other tech giants, such as AT&T,LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics ,Texas Instruments,and Vodafone.
The move sparked comparisons to two other mobile consortia: Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA), a group of more than 30 tech companies that is building an open-source mobile platform called Android, and the LiMo Foundation, which has similar plans. With consumers demanding more advanced services on their cellphones, pundits speculated that Nokia was trying to steal momentum--and developer talent--away from these competitors.