In Bulgaria, proponents of open source and open standards have booked a remarkable legal victory. On 7 December 2004 the Supreme Administrative Court ruled against the minister of state administration, Dimitar Kalchev. Two members of parliament and the foundation 'Access to Information Program' had demanded access to the 2002 agreement between Microsoft and the Bulgarian government on renting 30.000 copies of MS Windows XP and MS Office XP.

A jury of 3 decided to grant access to the document. Government has announced they will appeal the decision, and take it to a 5-member jury. Until then, the document will not be made available.

News item about the verdict (in Bulgarian, 09.12.2004)
http://portal.bg/news.php?cat=main&read=20040912002

(Contribution by Veni Markovski, EDRI-member ISOC Bulgaria)

Advocates of open source tools that use geographical data (GIS) are concerned about a new directive proposed by the European Commission on the use of governmental geospatial data. The INSPIRE Directive, adopted by the Commission in July 2004, aims to establish a spatial information infrastructure in Europe. It covers 30 broad types of data, such as (the location and the 3D descriptors of) buildings, forests, rivers, mountains, transport networks, all kinds of territorial definitions (names, postcodes, population and distribution of species) and all kinds of environmental indicators, such as occurrence of epidemics, pollution etc.

Critics say the consultation process has been unrepresentative, and fear that the proposed directive gives too much power to government data collection and licensing agencies. They argue that the directive imposes

On 17 September 2004, the experimental free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia reached 1 million (approved) entries. Every internet user can write entries, and suggest improvements for any other entry. This idea has proven extremely viable in the last 4 years. Wikipedia now provides information in 100 languages, 14 of which offer more than 10.000 articles each. With 140.000 articles, Germany is the second biggest contributor to the encyclopaedia after the UK.

To improve co-ordination among all the volunteers, Wikipedia launched a quarterly newsletter in 12 languages. The first edition mentions the initiative to put the German Wikipedia on a CD, and distribute it via the publishing house Directmedia Publishing. The publisher has announced it wants to distribute 30.000 CDs for free to all involved people in Germany, packaged with promotion for the commercial software DigiBib. Under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) all third parties can reuse Wikipedia articles as long as they pass on that right to others.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC put together a rather large chart providing information on the number and type of Open Source (OS) software policies and legislation considered by national, regional or local governments around the world. It looks at whether the policy or legislation mandated the use of OS, expressed a preference for OS software, encouraged its use or commissioned research into OS software.

Open Source Chart (last updated 08.09.2004)
http://www.csis.org/tech/OpenSource/0408_ospolicies.pdf

Bulgarian members of Parliament and Internet Society Bulgaria have filed a case with the Bulgarian Competition Protection Commission against both Microsoft Bulgaria and Microsoft USA.

The members of the Bulgarian Parliament Ivan Ivanov and Stoicho Katsarov and the Internet Society Bulgaria signed a letter to the Competition Protection Commission with four points questioning Microsoft practices and business behaviour.

The complaint concerns the development of the Bulgarian government e-gateway, which requires the users to have Windows and Internet Explorer if they want to use the electronic services, provided by the government. This is against rulings of art. 34 (2) of the Bulgarian law for protection of competition. Other articles concerned are art. 2 (1), points 2 and 3, and art. 18, point 2.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Internet Society of Bulgaria (ISOC-Bulgaria) have launched a project to stimulate the use of free/open source software for e-government projects.

The project aims to help municipal governments in South-eastern Europe to use free/open source software applications to enhance government transparency and people’s access to municipal services. Initially launched in Bulgaria, the project will soon expand to include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro.

Under this project, which will last 18 months in its first phase, several Balkan cities will benefit from the creation of e-municipalities. The city of Kurdjali, which serves as a pilot, requested the support of UNDP and ISOC–Bulgaria to help enhance citizens’ access to services and information resources and reduce the cost of the access tools that are required to be part of the global networked economy.

A district court in Munich, Germany granted a preliminary injunction against Sitecom Germany GmbH for violating a GNU General Public License (GPL).

Sitecom is offering a wireless access router product based on software developed by the netfilter/iptables project and licensed under GPL. The GPL offers a free license to software, but requires any re-distributor to provide the full source code. The GNU GPL is commonly used for many free software projects, such as the Linux Operating System Kernel.

According to the court, Sitecom did not fulfil the obligations imposed by the GNU General Public License covering the netfilter/iptables software. In particular, Sitecom did not make any source code offering or include the GPL license terms within their products.

Following a warning notice, Sitecom refused to sign a declaration to cease and desist. The netfilter/iptables project asked the court for a preliminary injunction, banning Sitecom from distributing its product, or comply with all obligations imposed by the public license.

Antitrust regulators from the all EU member States will discuss a draft European Commission antitrust ruling against Microsoft in Brussels on 15 March. In a second meeting on 22 March the regulators will discuss the measures, including fines, that will be taken against Microsoft. It is expected that the final ruling will become public in the days after the meeting.

The EU Commission has drafted a ruling that finds Microsoft guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Windows operating system. The Commission has been investigating Microsoft practices since 2000, following a complaint by Sun Microsystems. Sun accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant position in the market by not releasing crucial information about the communication between computers and servers running MS Windows. The Commission is also investigating the tying of Windows media player into the Windows operating system. This makes competition for other media players very difficult.