The Devil is in the Details
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FOSDEM 201310 / 90
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Software developerSoftwareLevel (video gaming)Open setExtension (kinesiology)AuthorizationState of matterLocal ringProjective planeSoftware frameworkStandard deviationRule of inferenceFile formatDirection (geometry)Patch (Unix)Computer programHuman migrationComputing platformFreewareOperating systemScaling (geometry)WordMereologyInstance (computer science)Source codePhysical systemMultiplication signTouch typingTerm (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Group actionObject (grammar)Revision controlProcess (computing)Numbering schemeEndliche ModelltheorieField (computer science)Design by contractCausalityPhysical lawTrailOperator (mathematics)Inheritance (object-oriented programming)Complex (psychology)Pattern languageCopyright infringementLatent heatOpen innovationVideo gameEmailPlanningComputer hardwareCoprocessorFuzzy logicCategory of beingType theoryDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Regular graphCodeWeb browserDescriptive statisticsInclusion mapPurchasingOcean currentComputer configurationInsertion lossNatural numberAreaBitQuicksortRight angleService (economics)Wave packetDatabase transactionPerfect groupMathematicsMP3Mechanism designElectronic GovernmentOrder (biology)Computer fileSinc functionDampingResultantSystem callExecution unitDecision theoryFiber bundleSingle-precision floating-point formatUnitäre GruppePerspective (visual)Image resolutionProduct (business)Representation (politics)Self-organizationInternet service providerTotal S.A.LaptopConnected spaceImplementationStrategy gameWebsiteVapor barrierFormal languageBootingCondition numberInformation securitySimilarity (geometry)WindowLine (geometry)Degree (graph theory)Distortion (mathematics)Exterior algebraAssociative propertyPoint (geometry)Discounts and allowancesPosition operatorDefault (computer science)Mixed realityMessage passingHorizonHacker (term)Address spaceInformation privacyArithmetic meanCartesian coordinate systemNeuroinformatikDigitizingRadical (chemistry)Virtual machineInteractive televisionInformationMaxima and minimaProcedural programmingProbability density functionOpen sourceAirfoilException handlingMedical imagingEnterprise architectureEntire functionChaos theorySummierbarkeitEqualiser (mathematics)Goodness of fitNormal (geometry)MultilaterationLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
So, the next keynote is about politics, and in particular free software, campaigning, what can be done at the European level and so forth.
00:21
The speaker is Amelia Andersdottir. So hello, I guess it's not morning anymore, but good morning to all of you anyway,
00:41
I guess many of you had a late night yesterday and are just waking up. My name is Amelia Andersdottir, I'm here to speak today as active in the European Parliament. I'm not a lawyer by training, and I dedicate myself primarily to policy work, and I followed free software and policy work around free software for quite some time.
01:04
It is in fact one of the main reasons that I became politically involved in the first place. So, the institution in which I work is one out of three institutions that make legally binding decisions in the European Union. What do I mean by legally binding? Well, so we write laws,
01:20
and they later hopefully apply to the people and public authorities and the companies that are active in the European Union. The other two institutions are the European Commission, which is what we call like an executive body. When we in the Parliament have made a law, the European Commission tried to ascertain that the laws we've made are actually implemented
01:41
correctly in all the member states and enforced. They also have a single right of initiative on proposing legislation. So this means that when we in the Parliament write the law, actually we don't write it from scratch, it's more like we're analyzing and proposing changes to a proposal
02:01
that was made by the European Commission. So we have a third institution, also the Council of Ministers, and this is just kind of an international organization operated by the governments of the different member states. They also developed the general policy lines of the European Commission, so whenever the Commission makes a proposal for a law, it's not like they just grab it out of thin air on their own accord, they also actually have
02:25
some kind of general political direction within which they can make these proposals. But the Council of Ministers operate through negotiations between ministers that come from the member state governments, so normally we have some bit of difficulty getting along, because we now have 27 member states, so this is a lot of different wills and different
02:43
directions that have to reconcile, but essentially they can do the same thing that we do in the European Parliament, which is look at the text proposed by the European Commission, say we don't like this word, we don't want the actual documentation, we want only the appropriate documentation, or maybe they want the adequate documentation, something like this,
03:03
and they propose these amendments, we call them. And then afterwards the Parliament and the Council have to agree on the different proposals that they passed on these texts, and that is a very long and arduous process, because often we make completely different objections to the Commission's proposals. But I was hoping not to get too stuck in this
03:21
general, this is how the EU works talk, so I will move on. It's just kind of important to know the general institutional framework in which we have to, or in which I have to work. So the first thing that is interesting to look at for software coders is, of course, if they are at all affected by European legislation, and they are in various ways,
03:42
and I'm sure that you've already noticed, and probably many of you even dedicate a lot of time into thinking about how you're affected by European legislation, but what I've noticed at previous editions of FOSTM is that when I follow the legal track, it's often unclear to free software coders which particular legislation they are affected by, or even like
04:02
which particular jurisdiction they are affected by. So we have some general laws that will normally cause a lot of upsettedness and rage, like the patent laws which are generally a mess, not only for the software field, but also for every other field, or in general also like copyright or licensing schemes and maybe public procurement rules. But in the European
04:26
developer communities, I've seen very extensive debates on American legislation and the problems caused by American legislation, so I sometimes get these emails from people who've seen maybe a lawsuit somewhere in the United States. They're very agitated with this, because the sum that had to be paid for somebody infringing on a patent that was clearly bizarre
04:44
is very large, and that is actually not so relevant for a European software developer. Similarly, if you get an infringement claim which doesn't really have like, you've infringed on this patent, please stop doing that, and the only thing that you have is basically a paper that says that, and it doesn't say which particular patent you
05:03
infringed on, it doesn't say who sent you this claim, or whatever. I mean, it doesn't make sense to be really upset with this to me, so this is something that, so that is something that I want to like immediately clarify. I work with European legislation, so whatever happens in the US, I see as really not my field, and if you're
05:24
planning to develop software in your European Union, probably you should not care about their legislation either, because it doesn't really apply to you if you're in Europe, or at least you could claim that it doesn't, I feel. So, I have to organize my papers.
05:47
So, of course, before I mention European laws that affect free software, I have to quickly jump back into a procedural note again, and I apologize for that. So, the European Union makes laws, and they will later normally be implemented in the member states,
06:04
and in the member states you have courts which interpret the laws made by the member states in that member state. So, when we make European law, this is a bit like fuzzy, and often it's not directly applied, and very often there is also a great disparity between how the laws
06:20
are implemented and actually upheld in the member states, and this is partially why we have the European Commission to ensure at least some type of regularity in this framework. So, which I primarily know of and follow are political discussions at the European Union level that exist
06:40
in Brussels, and they're sometimes very far away from what would be the practical implemented version of these laws in the member states. So, I mention this as a safeguard not to be held to accountable later. If I make a description of reality that seems to you as if it's not close to what you are familiar with, it's probably because I know what we have been thinking about
07:03
in Brussels, and then somebody at the member state level has been pondering what our intentions could be and just completely misunderstood our general directions. The different laws that apply to software in Europe would include copyright laws, patent laws, public procurement rules, which define how the public sector makes purchases to some extent at least. When we have the
07:27
standards in the European Union, and also actually projects that we try to facilitate between the member states through research or e-government programs. I could also add somewhere company law,
07:41
which is partly governed although patchily at the European level. We have eight or nine company directives that determine some common rules for how you make a startup or how you run the company in the various member states, but there's actually still a lot of differences. So, if you're planning to be an entrepreneur in the European Union, looking at the European legacy framework
08:01
normally isn't going to do you much good. You need to be aware of the conditions in your particular member state. So, if I start with copyright law and patent law, it's sometimes convenient to talk about both these legacy frameworks at the same time, because they share the some similarities, particularly in the enforcement. Also, the problem faced policy-wise are largely
08:23
the same. The political discussions are very muddled with enforcement havoc, and a relatively small amount of very large industrial actors are benefiting from publicly instituted market monopolies, and are at least partially making life difficult for everyone else. It's also a
08:41
legally complicated field, since everything one deals with when talking about these issues is basically abstract. So, if you're going to consider like a patent or a copyright, how would you tax the value of a copyright, for instance? Does it even have a value? Who decides what value it has,
09:00
and at what point after its conception does it have a value? If you write a piece of code today, clearly that could become valuable in like six months or a year to somebody or even to many people, but how would you kind of tax that value? That would actually be kind of a problem if you're dealing with legislation or even running a company around this. So, in Europe we have a
09:24
special copyright law for software. Software code, therefore, isn't actually covered by copyright as such. It's covered by a European law, which is based on the copyright law and dependent on the copyright law existing, but it has some special provisions which apply only to the software code.
09:41
In my country, which is Sweden, the software copyright directive is incorporated in the general copyright law, but there's a special code which again only applies to software code. So, one difference is that by default, software code which is written by any of you in the course of your employment will always fall on the employer. Normally you would expect this to be regulated in
10:06
contract between the employer and the employee. So, again, like an example from my country, journalists always get the copyright for the texts that they've written, and in Sweden, the journalist gets to keep the copyright for their texts, whereas, for instance, in Germany,
10:23
you will have difficulties finding a publisher who doesn't say that if you are a journalist in my employment, any text that you write to the copyright will fall to me. But this is then, this is statutory with software, so you cannot be an employee in the European Union, as far as I understand, and write code and have it, the software still fall to you unless you did the
10:46
code in your free time. Also, of course, for software programmers, the reality is that often you will have this clause in your employment contract anyway, because it's very common for especially larger companies that apply for many patents or trademarks that normally those companies would
11:05
not want their programmers to have a natural kind of right to stop that, and therefore in the employment contract it will say that any immaterial rights or intangible assets that are derived from your employment will automatically fall to us, the employer. So one of the things
11:28
that is important to understand about Europe and the European Union is also that we have these 27, soon to be 28 member states that have their own legal systems and their own courts, and this means that something like a software license like the GPL, for instance, would have to be
11:42
tried in all of those member states before they can actually be valid, and this is like part of the general copyright law, like the general contract framework, that in order for a contract to be valid, like between an employer and an employee or so, it has to be declared valid by court, because this is the safeguard mechanisms we have in our systems of justice. So a license
12:04
is basically a contract between the rights holder and whoever is making claims on that which is contracted. Licensing has become an extremely common way of creating value in society, and according to me a slightly arbitrary way of creating value, since it's the only thing you're doing is basically establishing that some transaction will occur when somebody does something with a thing that is
12:25
normally anyway easily possible for them to do and very cheap. Copying movies or MP3s would be a perfect example of something which is extremely cheap and easy to do, but that we're trying to put into this transaction framework, but it's also a very different debate, so I will not talk
12:41
about this too much. Contracts and licenses fall under the law. They exist because we recognize them, and we assume that they're valid, and the courts of nation states are meant to intervene when two contract parties have disputes over what the contract or the license actually requires those parties to do. So the courts will solve all of the conflicts, but only for their
13:06
particular jurisdiction, and the jurisdiction is normally just a member state. So through European legislation, we try to make the results of these conflict resolution mechanisms to not be entirely arbitrary between the member states, but with things that have very detailed provisions,
13:23
like for instance the GPL license or even a Creative Commons license, it can sometimes be very difficult to tell whether or not all parts of a license apply in all jurisdictions of the European Union. You could, for instance, imagine that if in one member state the licenses are completely upheld and the contract is seen as completely valid, in the different member states,
13:44
the courts will deem that according to our legislation, which has been implemented differently, only 80% of this license contract actually is valid. So for the GPL 2, there was an attempt to make a harmonized interoperable license, which was guaranteed to be valid in
14:00
all of the member states. The interoperable European public license was actually the work of the European Commission, and I think that they deserve some credit for that, and I think that also this is the type of things that we should want to see our public institutions doing. But the GPL 2 has also the feature of having been upheld in many different member states,
14:20
so we will normally know like how is it valid, where is it valid, which parts of it is valid, and so forth. I'm personally not aware of any cases where the GPL version 3 has been tried in European courts, but anyone in the audience who is aware of such cases could please get in touch with me, because I'd actually be very interested in seeing how European courts deal
14:41
with that. So other places where one might be interested in operability and openness and work from public institutions, other than licensing and contracting models for the subletting of as many people as possible able to interact with something relatively complex, is to have that complexity described in some kind of documented format, which is open and freely
15:05
available to people that want to interact. In software where it's comparatively easy and cheap to get started actually trying to do something that improves the life of you or your peers, open and freely accessible specifications are more beneficial than in other places. The European
15:22
Union does a lot of work with standards. Normally the Commission would deal with the standards, and the Parliament will only kind of intervene when they set up the framework within which they do these activities, and of course many of the standardization processes are for other parts of industry, so there's now a lot of discussion about open innovation and talk about access to
15:42
specification for hardware and other things, but different types of file formats and their various properties is definitely something that we bear in mind. The European institutions themselves, for instance, publish always their documents in machine-readable formats. This is kind of, well, the European Commission has a code which obliges them to do that now.
16:03
All EU law, in case law, entities and many other things are published in HTML, Microsoft Word documents and PDFs, and that would be like the old Microsoft Word format, because we're just starting to migrate into 2010. Software now in our previous edition is from
16:20
2003, so some of you will wonder also why I make an example of an institution which publishes documents in Microsoft Word, but it's actually interesting because it's more that there are three different formats to allow the maximum amount of kind of interaction from the citizens, so we have the machine readability in HTML, which is clearly open, and then we also have
16:41
human readable, which is PDF, and that is also clearly open. In the standardization procedures, we've gone on to talk a lot in Brussels lately about what we call fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms. So this is when a particular standard requires the implementation of something technical in order for the standard to be fulfilled,
17:05
and that technical thing is covered by a patent, so you need to be developing a licensing model that makes it easy to acquire the suitable licenses for those patents at a reasonable price. So the fair and non-discriminatory and reasonable basically means for the totality
17:23
of patents that could potentially be mixed up in this standard, you can get them at the price which doesn't kill your company or your activities. The technical term for this is FRAND, which is for fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, but now FRAND doesn't solve too many problems, at least for software programmers, and the reason is that the FRAND licensed patent
17:44
pool typically will still only be available to a relatively small amount of actors on the market that may already be dominant. So it cuts into the opportunities for developers to make very small companies or launch their products or services commercially since there will be a
18:00
license barrier, and we are unable to kind of see the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory as being free in terms of like free as in free beer in this case, so it will cost money and this is a barrier. It was also actually never particularly obvious to the European Commission that licensing cooperation in terms of friend agreements or patent pools would at all be
18:24
legal. One could imagine that if five big companies have been granted monopoly rights by a public institution, and then they all join in one business standard association to help each other reinforce their position on the particular market by giving each other discounts on licenses,
18:42
that would actually be some kind of cartel which is a breach of the competition law framework in the European Union. We have a very detailed framework for dealing with business standards associations, and this type of licensing cooperation in European competition law ensures that it doesn't get cartel-esque. The reason for this is that the patent system otherwise
19:04
would cause much, much more problems than it is currently doing, so it puts the patent system in a very interesting light when we have to create special solutions and deviations in our competition law framework to allow for what should reasonably be considered a cartel in order
19:21
for the system not to actively damage industry, but it's a political problem in that we really aren't capable of having any other discussions about this, or like politically it's very difficult to move because there's too many industrial actors impacted by the system, and whenever you try to do something about the patent law, and we've seen this also last
19:44
year with the discussions about the unitary patent, they tug into many directions and you can never make a compromise which will be entirely obvious to everyone, so this is strange. So the last two points that I can just briefly mention are like public procurement, and this is a bit of
20:06
a tricky legal area because we have many procurement directives in the European Union where we try to kind of steer how the public institutions of the various member states will be making purchases. Public procurement essentially is when a public body says I want to have some
20:21
service but I don't want to develop it in-house, so I'm going to contract it in or buy it from a private actor, and because many member states in the European Union have, they either discriminate geographically or they have problems with corruption, we make a lot of laws at the European level to make sure that we get cross-border trade and that people don't discriminate each other based
20:42
on geographical origin, that kind of thing. In the current procurement discussions that we've had in the European Parliament, they were explicitly discussing how to make deviations from the public procurement rules on geographical discrimination if this was for social or for environmental
21:01
purposes. In the ICT solutions, still we don't have this ambition to kind of go towards specifically open formats, so even if generally we will have a kind of large political support for that, we don't actually put it in the legislation, so it's not really a reason to
21:20
make a deviation from the principle that a public institution should always buy the most cheap thing, because buying the cheapest contractor is seen as the most responsible way of dealing with the citizens' money in the European Union. Also for the e-government services that I can bring up very briefly, these are normally big projects launched by the European Commission to help the
21:42
member states implement some kind of feature that will make the member states more interoperable, so that if you move from Sweden to Belgium for instance, you will be able to interact with public institutions in approximately the same way that you used to do when you were growing up. And the European Commission of course concluded that the best way of making all of the member
22:02
states implement these things was to actually make them open source, because that way the European Commission can give them away for free, and also you can provide the local authorities to kind of change the software, so it becomes more convenient for everyone to do it that way. And so the European Commission makes a lot of kind of fluffy proposals, like the European patent,
22:22
the unitary patent obviously came from them, but to their credit they have a lot of different units, and some of the units do a lot of great work, and I think the e-government unit for instance is one of those institutions. So what is really difficult with all of the topics from the perspective of free software is kind of that free software is not really a
22:41
widespread phenomenon, and software programming in particular definitely is not. So the interests in the free software community aren't always congruent also, so somebody who will develop free software in their free time is likely to have very different requirements on the legislation and the regulatory framework in which they act, from somebody who is programming
23:02
a commercial phone exchange targeting business operations, that is they are targeting other businesses for their products, or somebody who is for instance developing market, who's trying to market web browsers to end consumers, or for that matter modules to try and take care of agricultural technologies that ensure the well-being of cattle. So one thing that I've
23:25
seen happening in the policy making process though is that the openness and freedom in software infrastructures has a lot of political support, and this is something also that the free software community as far as I've seen often underestimate. Politically we have governments
23:41
and like high-up government representatives and even ministers, deputies in the European Parliament and legislators not having a problem at all supporting open standards, open source software, even free software and deployment of these in different localities. So what we like is actually more deployment of these tools or even access to it. We have supplier shortage
24:02
and very often when people decide that they want to go open they don't have anywhere to turn to because they don't have the right networks or they don't know actually how. In the law also it's very difficult because we cannot always overview the results of what
24:21
we're doing. So we were discussing the standards directive in 2011 for instance and we did introduce wording of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing and that intervention makes sense if one aims to deal with a symptom and make a particular standard of accepting circumstance less severe because the patent system as such really it's a horrible mess
24:44
and politically dealing with this is next to impossible. There's too many interest groups that they go everywhere and even if it is the cause of many problems it's very, very difficult to change and the front licensing at least partially mitigates that. Also the front
25:02
licensing terms is presented by industry as something that fixes problems that are very noticeable by end consumers such as super large injunctions in the Netherlands for instance. So it doesn't deal with the underlying cause of the problem and I think it shows that we have a
25:22
bit of a failure in the political system also because we really kind of lack direction when we're unable to deal with the law that obviously causes problems. So the political system and institutions have a very hard time admitting to themselves also that there may be problems in a legislative framework that they cannot address. So we get hacks rather than cures
25:48
and even when we know perfectly well what the cure to the particular problem we're facing might be we cannot admit to ourselves that we're actually unable to discuss the problem to begin with. So there's another thing that I've seen also is that essentially well-intending proposals
26:03
end up getting worded wrong. This is more like a technical legal detail like technology neutral for instance is a term that we use in public procurement to describe a procurement process where in which no technologies are discriminated against in procurement calls or tenders. So a public institution would for instance make a tender for I need this small
26:23
application for making it more easy for people to apply for the permission to build a balcony on my house and if that is technology neutral doesn't that kind of mean that you're not allowed to discriminate between proprietary and free software. So even if you kind of implemented a software strategy in your municipality technology neutrality in that case would kind
26:44
of restrict your options because you have to see all of the offices as equal. So I'm not sure for instance that I would always pick technology neutral laws in many cases they're good and we want laws to be generally applicable but if it's about us making an investment in an
27:01
infrastructural thing like the software framework of a local authority I think we can afford ourselves the luxury of actually basing that decision at least partially on an ideological framework because in doing so we'd be also choosing on which platforms our citizens and companies and local authorities could interact but it turns out when I was discussing this
27:24
and in the public sector information directive that was when this technology neutrality term came up it turns out actually that everyone that I was talking to had a very strong support of open formats and they wanted normally the public sector to go into open formats and what they were actually afraid of was more that the European legislation would force local authorities
27:44
to adopt formats that they may not want or software solutions that they may not be ready to migrate into or whatever so they were introducing this wording that at least according to me would have brought in a legal uncertainty for a local authority and how they can make strategies
28:00
for implementing free software and we wouldn't want local authorities to suddenly panic and incur high costs for software platform migration but right now we landed in the parliament at least on expressing a strong preference for open formats which means that well we would prefer
28:21
it if the local authority could investigate ways of taking the migration costs nobody will force them to do so and if the public authorities at the local level don't care the law doesn't actually oblige them to do so so in my opinion because I discovered this and we had cross political support also for the open source solution in the public sector I believe that
28:43
the political fight over open source and free software is more or less one it's good to keep watch over like the details and legislation because we still have words like technology neutral that sound appealing but that may actually cause harm in some cases but this is more like you know detailed work we don't really need to be afraid of deputies openly resisting open
29:06
or free software anymore even governments so this is what if I were a free software programmer and I was going to get involved in European legislation making I would kind of just gently
29:21
nudge my politicians into thinking very carefully about exact facings or maybe even try to get somebody who's in Brussels to do that for me because you know the ideological fight I think we need now providers and people who actually start approaching local authorities to make sure that they have the software solutions that actually they want and I would like to
29:45
end on that note maybe that I think we need more free software providers that target public authorities in the European Union we need to be making connections with local authorities in particular and also government institutions so that there is actually something for these institutions to procure because at least when I've been talking to people in the European
30:04
institutions even when I meet people at local authorities even when they support free software they don't know where to go to get it so thank you for allowing me to come and I hope that that was sufficiently optimistic if you have any questions you can approach me later
30:32
so does anyone want to ask a question now yeah hello I think most of the people here are in
30:54
favor of open source software but we've just seen another attack on open source by Microsoft
31:00
where laptops that have been designed for Windows 8 have locked down the FE so that you can no longer boot in alternative operating systems I see there was a question asked in the Parliament about that have there been any answers yet so interesting question actually
31:21
yes I received the question in my inbox the answer to that question in my yesterday and the Commission says that they haven't seen any competitive distortions arising from the UEF by secure boot yet but that they're monitoring the situation why would you laugh at that it's good
31:42
they're monitoring the situation so but the answer unfortunately has been transmitted to me in Swedish my native language it should be published on the European Parliament website sometime soon and it answers both of those questions at the same time so they make no distinction between the competitive in like they don't make a distinction between the freedom of a consumer which I suggest would be regulated under consumer protection laws and the freedom
32:06
of developers which I would say is regulated under the competition framework but answer both of them at once and say that they have seen no competitive distortions arise from the implementation of the system yet and we didn't look at it too carefully yet maybe we can ask
32:23
a follow-up question but at least they've been made aware that there is a case for it and the only thing where I could kind of see myself going on along this line is long like okay but the consumer protection laws then isn't there a consumer protection law that says that a consumer cannot be kind of when they buy their hardware they can be forced into picking a solution which is
32:43
found this way but that would also kind of oblige me to prove that a consumer could actually be actively disadvantaged by the system and because the consumer I think would normally be be getting a code I'm not sure that that would be the case but it's kind of like an interesting
33:02
mix of various legal topics if you want to talk more about that we can meet that course.
33:28
I'm very pleased you talked quite a bit about very reasonable and non-distrimatory licensing front ends is the European Union going to do anything about industrial standards that are mandated to industry where the patent license holder refuses its brand obligations
33:46
specifically based on the fact that the software is open source so there are certain patent holders that see that you're trying to get a patent license for full for the use of open
34:03
source software and as a result of that because it in fact you know because of the fact it's open source ignores your request very similar to the way this sort of mobile phone industry companies have been doing it but that's on a much larger scale where you know where the Fran patent is
34:23
just either refused or they ignore your requests whereas the Fran system should at least start a negotiation. There's a bit of an echo but it's about Fran licensing and when a Fran license is refused. Yes on technical standards that are mandated by the European Union. Well the
34:45
Commission has a working group on this but because I work in the European Parliament we wouldn't we decided a framework in which the European Commission can set up working groups to address these issues and as far as I know we've made a framework where in which the Commission
35:03
has the option of making such a work group and I've seen that the enterprise organizes workshops on these topics where they invite large stakeholders including from the open source community so but like it the European Parliament at least I would assume it's not the right institution to be
35:24
dealing with this problem because we cannot really change much in that the European Commission tries and I know that in the industrial policy that was recently released by the European Commission they explicitly complain about patent that gets patent pools and what do you do with
35:41
standards and transparency like it's almost impossible to find out who owns all of these patents and I think that in the industrial policy this is really becoming such a severe problem now that we need to introduce some kind of transparency requirement that you as a company need to be starting to keep like file source over which patents you you think that
36:04
you actually own specific standards or specific industrial areas and we're working on that but the European problem in the European Parliament it's been very very difficult to get this type of burning through the European Parliament can sometimes be slightly decisive when it comes to
36:22
very concrete topics like whether or not we want appropriate documentation or just documentation or something like this but when it comes to questioning things like intellectual well sorry I should not use that word so when it comes to things like this entire bundle of immaterial
36:42
rights and legal legal rights that we entitlements that we give to private actors in society we are very bad at looking past the enforcement debate and it's very very locked and basically all of the undecided deputies will still default on enforcement and harsh punishments or something
37:02
like this which makes any more nuanced discussion extremely difficult but I think the only way to solve that is by having a more aggressive kind of debate that maybe a member state level so that politicians get incentivized to think about copyright or patents in non enforcement terms
37:20
but I want to be clear about that like when we have the unitary patent discussions it's not only software coders that are affected by this even the agree like breed plant breeding companies and plant breeding companies are super huge like the agricultural industrial complex you know goes to the European Parliament and says we need a breeders exception and the European Parliament
37:42
is unable to provide that in the patent law so and this is there by no means a disorganized group of hobbyists they're actually a very large industrial complex and still they have such extreme difficulties getting through in patent law debate and I think that really kind of
38:03
symbolizes just how locked and messed up that political debate is okay thank you any further questions one more here you mentioned that under European law when someone develops software a
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software developer the copyright belongs to whoever pays for his job and but what is the situation when software is developed under European funding so I'm thinking you know horizon
38:41
2020 is coming up a lot of software will be developed within that framework also you talk of a image problem the Commission seeming like it's unfriendly to open source when it's actually trying to work for it on the other hand how much open source is actually running on the desktops of employees in the European Commission isn't there maybe in sense of
39:03
public procurement laws for others but when it comes to applying it to oneself what is the situation there I mean how much there would be a very strong message being sent if the Commission itself were to adopt these principles so on the first question it's
39:22
European research funding used to develop software does it become open source and the answer is it depends on what the software was developed for normally it will be the people that are participating in the project that make the decision on how to release the proceeds of their project in the horizon 2020 framework program which is kind of the new research funds
39:45
the European Commission has made a very very strong push towards more open access and more open publication of results and data and everything affiliated with the process the European Parliament decided to be more cautious about accepting the virtues of openness in a way that
40:02
at least I am strongly critical of and I'm not quite sure why the Parliament went that way because we've been more conservative than industry and there was really no good reason for us to be that but I think somebody just had a mental lapse and didn't realize what they were doing so
40:23
but but when it comes to projects that are developed as common infrastructures and even actually the very technical projects if you look at privacy enhancing technologies for instance or the European Union does a lot of work with that anything almost that goes towards the e-government sector unless you have a very very strong industrial player participating in
40:42
that project they will normally become open also open source because the Commission prefers that now on your second question why does the European institutions use Microsoft products in all of their end-user terminals this is very simple because they are the only actor which is capable of providing a technical infrastructure for maybe 30,000 people or so or 35,000 people
41:04
and I happen to know that even if you were to disagree with the way that the European Commission does its procurement because it's done centrally at the digit I think which is the unit of the Commission that does procurement and they publish these tenders and then they get replies and then they deploy the infrastructure in all of the European institutions and if you
41:25
have a problem with the way that you're doing that you would have to challenge the procurement proceedings so there are some legitimate claims that you could make they publish the tenders too soon they make requirements that obviously can only be fulfilled by one vendor that kind of thing but when the Free Software Foundation in Europe has been looking for companies from the free software sector to challenge the way that the European Commission does
41:44
its procurement they haven't found any and at some point if you're looking to go into the procurement at the European level and you have a problem with the way that we get our software solutions you have a legal instrument with which you can challenge the way they did their procurement and if you are unable to find anyone willing to do that actually it's
42:02
not because we will still need our computers to work so for us kind of in the meantime then using this solution so but but if I think that Karsten Gerloff at the Free Software Foundation in Europe nobody would be any happier than he would be if you went to him and said
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listen I'm a free software provider I think that I could fix the European institutions please help me challenge DigiEdit and their procurement thank you any further questions one writer for the back hi this is a two-part question concerning public procurement
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first part is is it actually legal for a European state to say I will not accept the your tender because it is based on open source and I don't want that and the second part is
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is it legal for a European state to say I will not accept your tender if it doesn't already work as as software in another country so the question is whether or not we would be to
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whether or not we would be allowed to make a law at the member state level that refuses a software solution that isn't open or free yes and the second and the second question was the second question is is it a valid requirement to say that for my states to accept this software it has to be installed
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in another country as well in order for me to procure this software it would have to be sold in another member state as well yes if it is legal to say that for this tender I will
44:02
only accept software that is already installed in another state on the first question I don't know actually I'm not sure if you're allowed to make a law in the member state that prohibits
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the procurement of specific software like that prohibits the procurement of proprietary software I would assume that you can only make but maybe it depends on the institutional framework in the member state as well so because you have lots of different levels of in Sweden I would find
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that difficult to see how the government could make such a law since our municipalities have a very high degree of autonomy but I really wouldn't be able to tell and then on the second question again I mean I'm not I'm not a lawyer and probably it could depend between the members
45:05
no because that's a cross-board ratio so that would have to be European legislation I have no idea something to take away and think about right well we're coming up to ten to one so I think we'll we'll draw a line under this debate here