Following from the story yesterday that advocates of open source are to march to promote proposed legislation in California that would make state agencies use open source software, there has been a report on a group today which will be lobbying against governments promoting open source software.
The campaign is attempting to make governments think twice when they use open source software and has been named "The Initiative for Software Choice". The group was formed in May and is backed primarily by Microsoft and chaired by CompTIA but also has support from Intel and other companies from around the world.
In some countries including France and Germany there has been or is likely to be legislation passed which promotes the use of open source software such as Linux. Software Choice is concentrating on major legislative changes such as the California lobby that would limit closed source companies.
The group has said: "When public funds are used to support software research and development, the innovations that result from this work should be licensed in ways that take into account both the desirability of broadly sharing those advances as well as the desirability of applying those advances to commercialised products". A spokesman from Microsoft has stated that open source licences prohibit the commercial use of software while open source advocates claim there are examples in companies like IBM of how open source can be used to make money.