Looking from my admittedly narrow vantage point over European public IT procurement, I see today a structural and very fundamental incompatibility between how enterprise IT is expected to be transacted and how open source lends itself to commercial activity.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Take the recent example of the Hungarian government allocating over €40 million to open source. Part of the reason they were forced to such a drastic gesture was that the value of the contract they were putting out to tender was above the threshold set forth in the European directives (in Denmark, I think this is roughly around DKK 1,400,000 or roughly €200,000). Think about that, two hundred thousand euros. With proprietary licensing models, it isn't too difficult to hit that kind of threshold. The threshold is in fact set that high because it has been geared to traditional software procurement, which has been proprietary and expensive enough to suggest a threshold of €200,000.

While the Swedes are busy finding more representatives of the recording industry they can talk into participating in various roles in legal action against filesharers, I thought to write a post to exhibit what is likely to turn out to be my supreme ignorance of IP law.

Having set your expectations appropriately low, how's this for a proposition:

Torrent file authors assert intellectual ownership over their Metainfo file by prominently displaying a copyright notice by its link on the webpage it is uploaded to. A license to use the bittorrent file is granted to users which contains a clause that the licensee will not sue any peers encountered during the download. Violation of this clause renders the license void, in effect making the suing party a copyright violator.

So, the Hungarian government has launched a policy to use half of the IT budget on open source software. Effective in a few weeks, which in the alternate universe of public administration is equivalent to yesterday.

The more innocent corners of the open source community have been making much of this and expecting great mileage; it almost feels like a scaled down version of when Munich announced their open source intentions.

It's an extremely drastic move (and grossly miscalculated move were it even genuine), but what is really behind it?

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been getting some attention here and there, mainly for the potential for file sharers to get disconnected. Turns out there's a lot more on the horizon; quite apart from the agreement's potential to ban fairly innocuous practises such as deep linking (boy Google, are you in trouble), the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade has been soliciting. (pause) Ahem, that was worth the sentence fragmentation. To resume, the DG has been soliciting input and commentary from various stakeholders.

The Global Intellectual Property Center under the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the wold's largest lobbyist organization) has responded with this letter (that's a pdf link). It's a really good read, and I commiserate unequivocally. With the mothers who raised these slimeballs.

You know I have a bee in my bonnet when I blog twice on the same topic in the space of a scant few hours after a blogging hiatus of several months (well it's either that or I'm scatterbrained; your pick).

I don't want to let this slide. e-voting is too important. I'm not the Welfare Minister, but we live in a country where that person should answer to the people and perhaps we just need to shout loudly enough. So I have decided to draft a petition, and I need your help.

This article was written with the objective of understanding how traditional Islamic law would or does regard intellectual property, with the emphasis here and there (as relevant) to open culture and free software. I am not a lawyer, and this article was written with the support of some beer (though not too many); my claims to authority, weak as they may be, are living in Egypt for some 17 or 18 years and having played a solid role in creating the Egyptian Linux Users Group. I am open to discussion (that's what the comments are for!) and will revise this article when time and reasons avail themselves.