14 DAY TRIAL // A high ranking official from the European Union accused certain elite IT companies of looking at their open-source developers as simple employees and exerting too much pressure on the evolution of the open-source community.
The accusations brought about by Jes￭s Villasante, leader of the software solutions department of the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate General division, are generally targeting major American companies in the IT industry. Thus, HP, IBM and Sun are accused of using the open-source community as simple suppliers of software solutions and not encouraging them to create independent commercial products.
The conditions these companies impose in the development of a customer's project is that the respective solution, even if it's open-source, is to be considered IBM open-source, or HP open-source or Sun open-source. The potential of the open-source communities is thus enlisted to the benefit of these giant companies, and Villasante tried to get the attention of these developers, whom he requested to design more independent solutions, outside the reach of IT's worldwide mega-companies.
Its not the first time the patronizing position of the top companies with respect to the open-source developers is a subject of debate, but these accusations flagrantly contradict the praises the same companies received for their contribution to the development of the open-source phenomenon in general. IBM was especially active in lobbying the open-source solutions, which were adopted by many companies following its efforts.