Hi all,
today I moderated the first panel at the standards edge conference here in Rio prior to the Internet Governance Forum. The topic Certified Open came up a couple of times along the day, and the 40 leaflets I put on the table were gone by the end of the day. I assume that Benoit Müller of the BSA and Nicos L. Tsilas, Senior Director IP & Interoperability Policy, Government and Industry Affairs at Microsoft both took one.
Generally the feedback was very positive, in particular Laura DeNardis From Yale Law School also was quite interested, as she's working in the field of standards policy.
Overall reception was very positive, though.
The only disconcerting feedback was from Carl F. Cargill, Director of Corporate Standards at Sun Microsystems. He was generally in favor, but said that we're likely to be taken down by legal action and that it took him about 100k EUR to figure out the problem.
He described it as one related to burden of proof issues which are on Certified Open when if we were being sued by a vendor for having caused damage to their product sales by giving biased evaluation or having had a biased certification -- and it would be on us to prove that there was no bias.
Carl described the issue as US centric, but it seems we should have a look at this and potentially seek legal input on the issue.
Regards, Georg