All: I’ve read the
FAQ. This provides a lot of clarity for newcomers into a process that has evolved over some time. (Thank
you to the Eclipse staff for providing it.) The important clause referenced in a few places:
“Membership is the mechanism by which each participating organization agrees to the intellectual property, antitrust, working group, and specification processes and policies.
It is membership that creates the level playing field for all participants.”
It is precisely those processes and policies that Microsoft cares about in this case as we collectively work as members together to support the EU request for CEN/CENELEC to develop standards to measure conformity to the EU CRA, and ensure those standards account
for the open source licensed projects on which we depend. It is those processes and policies that should give EU regulators and ESO the confidence in our work product as we help them better understand how open source software fits this new regulatory space.
Microsoft invests in a myriad of ways (directly funding and through membership) across the open source nonprofit space because it uses the projects in
our products and services to customers that are supported by those nonprofits, their commercial members, and project developers. We have an enormous dependency on the software that comes from our nonprofit foundation partners and need you all to succeed
in an EU CRA enabled world. As a commercial organization, we also develop and publish projects of our own, working in large communities of contributors, and may well fall into the steward category (whatever it comes to mean under the EU CRA) for some of the
larger communities we started and continue to sustain.
>From that Microsoft perspective, I hope all the open source nonprofit foundation members join the Foundation membership class such that our collective work products represent the broadest experience and consensus possible. The Eclipse Foundation has set the
membership financial bar to zero to enable open source nonprofits to cleanly engage in the work and specifications process as members, and to have clear representation in the supporting work. This collaboration sets the pattern for other EU regulatory work
coming our way. As the Microsoft Board member to the Eclipse Foundation, I will continue to support this working group in all ways.
kind regards, stephe
