Say ecosystem* and most of us will think of something delicate and finely balanced. We have been taught to understand that the environment is made up of systems which hang together and that disturbances in one part will created unintended and in our experience sad consequences.

Say Microsoft, Adobe or General Motors and we tend to think of corporate bohemoths hardly the delicate flowers in need of protection, but more often a cause of some destruction within their particular ecosystem.

A letter (pdf here) to the European Commission has recently come to light (it was leaked). The letter shows the extent which the anti-Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) lobby is prepared to go in order to maintain control of their dominant business model for the production of software.

The letter was sent in response to a recent EU report on the role of open-source software in the European economy. The letter warns of against encouraging the FOSS movement. The letter states that the actions taken by the European Commission could “disrupt the entire software eco-system” and the report itself was biased and looked “more like a marketing document than a serious survey”.

The letter comes from The Initiative for Software Choice (ISC). A name which inspires one to think of openness and freedom. Yet the group is a lobby group funded by proprietary software manufacturers – this, in itself, may be seen as a contradiction in terms.
According to Techworld the ISC was created to oppose government efforts to give preference to open-source or open standards-based systems. According to critics such as Bruce Perens, the ISC largely pursues a pro-Microsoft agenda, though the group itself emphasises that it has more than 300 members.

The letter is full of artful uses of language and leaves the unsuspecting reader with an impression that the writer is concerned about the welfare of the European Union and its development. At the same time the message is hammered home – with the subtly of a rhino with a headache – do not change anything. The system works as it is.

Naturally the concerns of the manufacturers of proprietary software should and must be taken into consideration but this letter is a masterful peice of dubbletalk and rhetoric (in the worst way).

Read the letter and LEARN from it.

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* An ecosystem refers to the collection of components and processes that comprise, and govern the behavior of, some defined subset of the biosphere. The term is generally understood to refer to all biotic and abiotic components, and their interactions with each other, in some defined area, with no conceptual restrictions on how large or small that area can be. To many, ecosystems, like any other system, are governed by the rules of systems science and cybernetics, as applied specifically to collections of organisms and relevant abiotic components. To others, ecosystems are primarily governed by stochastic events, the reactions they provoke on non-living materials and the corresponding responses by organisms. (Wikipedia)