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.