2004-08-25 UN CEFACT standardisation jeopardised by "IP" disputes, Microsoft drops out
--> [ News | Standardisation | Microsoft | SAP ]
- news first published by Reuters and New York Times, author John Markoff
Google search (a large number of derived articles have been published)
- NYTPrintText
- article suggests that the body is asking members to pledge that they will not later come out with software patents to charge royalties for the standards that they are jointly developping. SAP and others find this unacceptable
- possibly the UN body is also trying to prevent the participants from sending proxies to come up with software patents later
- unfortunately the author leaves the heart of the dispute clouded, only cites complaints of SAP et al about "indemnification against all intellectual property claims" and links this to the SCO case
- there also seems to be a conflict about whether royalties should be charged for the standard. The author leaves this clouded, but the hint about conflicts between an open-source and a proprietary (Microsoft) camp suggests that this is the subject of conflict.
UN will Verbreitung von Linux foerdern (article about efforts at UN to promote free software)
