Monday August 15, 2005 Copyright Office Tries to Turn Back Time
Congratulations and cheering are in order today as Mozilla's Firefox web browser has just passed the 80 million download point - quite ironic in the light of the move by the US Copyright Office worthy of the 1990s to ensure that you can only use Microsoft's web browser to access their web site to file advance patents. They've called for comments and the community here at Sun is preparing a formal response to be sent, in quintuplicate on paper as they request, to explain to them the anti-competitive nature of their actions and the risks of promoting a monoculture. Some handy facts:
- In May 2005, over 60% of the visits to Sun's web site were conducted with browsers other than Internet Explorer
- Microsoft don't make a web browser for any Unix platform, including Sun's Solaris 10, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, or for any desktop environment they host such as Sun's Java Desktop System
So the Copyright Office wants to mandate a non-standards-compliant browser which is implicated in most of the browser security issues that plague the corporate world, ensure that none of Sun's products can be used to file advance copyright claims and ensure Sun's customers are compelled to use competing products. Y'know, that doesn't sound good for a government agency, especially one that's used internationally as well - surely they need to be opening up, not closing down?
My passion sounds partisan, but I'd actually be just as unhappy about the mandating use of any other single browser - I'm hopeful we'll hear from some right-minded Microsofties pointing out the foolishness of the idea too. The participative future involves open standards, not vendor selection.
While I recognise the challenges presented by offering support for the diverse desktop computing market and the many browser options in use, I'd urge the copyright office not to exclude Sun, its customers and the Open Source meta-community from the ability to file advance copyrights. Plenty of companies found browser restrictions like this to be a recipe for lost business in the 90s - please learn from the mistakes of the last decade. It's just all-round the wrong, closed direction to be going as the massively-connected world opens up.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 15 2005, 10:50:15 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [0]
