On 6 Jun 2011, at 09:13, Andreas Kuckartz wrote: > Am 06.06.2011 09:25, schrieb Greg Stein: > One of the main topics of the whole discussion regarding the > OpenOffice.org incubation proposal was and is collaboration with TDF / > LO. And now the first "initial committer" from IBM in the proposal > states that some ways of collaborating with TDF /LO might be illegal and > should not even be discussed.
I think that this is a very *very* valid concern. And one I've certainly heard expressed in recent months more regularly than in the years past. And it is one which is common for 'industry consortia' like ours - who end up having a lot of market impact due to their neutrality combined strength of their respective markets. And that is not a theoretical thing - nor is intervention (though historically such intervention has usually been at the source - i.e. the amount of leeway a large company/organisation gets to work & bestow their good-will onto others). However - it is just a concern. I do not think that it is a problem - as these effects are well understood at a regulatory level - and are common to a lot of standards bodies and industry coordination entities. One of the things we could do on this side of the pond (e.g. in Europe) is pro-actively open a dialogue with, say, the EU, under the digital agenda[1]. I'd suggest the latter - as it has identified a number of 'actions' to which collaboration between the ASF, TDF and LO would be very conductive. As opposed to working with the enforcement side of the regulatory arm. That way we'd have the right-hand of the regulators help us shape this, we help the regulators by introducing them into relatively new technology & power systems and we'd also further some of the Digital Agenda - which I personally think is a good thing. Thanks, Dw 1: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/index_en.htm
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