The Danish Cloud Community hosts an event to celebrate its support of The Ten Principles of Fair Software Licensing for Cloud Customers, shedding light on the current efforts to modernize European regulation of digital markets.
Copenhagen, 24th September 2021. On Wednesday 22nd September, the Danish Cloud Community hosted an event to celebrate its support of The Ten Principles of Fair Software Licensing for Cloud Customers. With contributions from MEP Karen Melchior and Kim Jørgensen, head of cabinet for Margrethe Vestager, the event shed light on the current efforts to modernize European regulation of digital markets while it also provided examples of harmful effects of these unfair licensing terms.
Certain legacy software providers seek to use entrenched positions in on-premise software such as productivity suites, to restrict and direct the choice of customers to their own cloud solutions. The Danish Cloud Community and its members believe that such practices are unfair. Therefore, the Danish Cloud Community supports The Principles of Fair Software that have been developed by CISPE, the voice of cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe, as a way to counter these unfair practices.
The speeches of both MEP Melchior and Kim Jørgensen made it clear that the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a significant moment in the evolution of the digital economy in Europe as it seeks to redress the balance between dominant ‘Gatekeepers’ (Tech Giants) and the wider ecosystem of innovators, customers and providers in the digital market.
Along with CISPE and other European organisations, the Danish Cloud Community believes that Digital Markets Act and the Principles for Fair Software Licensing share a common ground. Therefore, the organisations support the DMA as originally proposed, all the while working actively to include some software specific additions in the requirements for gatekeepers under the DMA.
During the event, Karen Melchior, MEP, said; “The DMA has an ambitious focus on interoperability. Cloud itself is a digital service so it is quite crucial that it is included in this work ensuring that businesses and consumers can collaborate and use services from multiple vendors.”
Kim Jørgensen explained; “The whole idea of the Digital Markets Act which the Commission adopted late last year is to address the negative consequences arising from platforms acting as digital “gatekeepers” to the internal market. The DMA establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”. This allows the DMA to remain well targeted to the problem that it aims to tackle as regards large, systemic online platforms.”
Commenting on the launch Jens E. Thorndahl, director, Danish Cloud Community said; “We’ve heard from our members and their customers over several years the difficulty they have in understanding and ensuring compliance with complex and onerous licence agreements with some legacy players. As they move to the as-a-service model of the cloud they are keen to step away from these terms and avoid the lock-in practices they’ve witnessed in the past. Speaking on behalf of the cloud vendors, we fundamentally support this, and we are committed to offering choice, transparency and fairness to all their customers.”
Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, added; “The DMA is an historic opportunity to finally end harmful software licensing practices which have stymied growth and innovation for years. As Europe moves to a cloud-based, digital economy it is essential the MEPs and Commission act to ensure these practices are not allowed to transfer over to this new fast moving digital world.”
The Principles can be viewed and downloaded (in Danish and 18 other languages) from www.fairsoftware.cloud and the organisation is calling on Danish companies to use them in negotiations with their suppliers. It urges its members to do the same and embrace the Principles as core to a vibrant, competitive and fair market for cloud services in Denmark.
For further information, please contact
Jens E. Thorndahl, Director, Danish Cloud Community, +45 28 35 50 96 or jet@cloudcommunity.dk, or
Francisco Mingorance, Executive Secretary, CISPE, +32 476 977 153, francisco.mingorance@cispe.cloud.