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Microsoft leaned on EC to spike open source report
An attempt to bury bad news?

By Richard Thurston

Published: Thursday 08 February 2007

The European Commission has resisted efforts by Microsoft to make it abandon its report into open source software, it was revealed this week. But the EC was swayed into allowing a 10-day period for feedback before completing the report.

Harnessing the opportunity to provide feedback, Microsoft produced 25 pages of arguments as to why the report - which quantified the benefits of open source to European organisations - should be shelved. The software giant also commissioned a respected university academic to back its case and enlisted the help of a trade association, CompTIA.

The academic produced 45 pages of evidence supporting Microsoft's case, while CompTIA wrote a 40-page submission.

The authors of the Commission's report, headed by academics from the United Nations University in Maastricht, made several amendments to the report as a result of those comments, and comments received from other interested parties.

But the EC remained committed to publishing the report, according to its lead author Rishab Ghosh.

Ghosh said: "There were critical comments from CompTIA. There were others: Microsoft, the software alliance [The Initiative for Software Choice] - all along the same lines as CompTIA with varying degrees of details - with the intention to bury the report. They [Microsoft] threw the book at us."

Ghosh, who is a senior open source software researcher, said the Commission refused to back down under Microsoft's pressure. "The European Commission acted very properly," he said. "There were lots of conversations [saying] that it should be published."

Asked whether the report's pro-open-source stance was diluted after the comments, Ghosh said: "We certainly didn't weaken the report."

Ghosh said the EC introduced the 10-day feedback period after a "heated discussion" at a public report workshop in September, which was attended by several Microsoft representatives.

Richard Thurston writes for ZDNet UK