This secrecy allowed the organisers to cherry pick participants to tilt the discussion in favour of software patents in Europe which shouldn’t even exist, of course, according to the European Patent Convention, FRAND supporters and proprietary software companies, even though the latter are overwhelmingly American so much for loyalty to the European ideal. The plan was clearly to produce the desired result that open source was perfectly compatible with FRAND, because enough people at this conference said so.

via European Commission’s Low Attack on Open Source – Open Enterprise.

Also worth noting in the above statement from the report is the claim that “the distinction between software and hardware is increasingly artificial”. I think if we decode this, what it means is that in the old world of hardware – for example, in telecommunications or codecs – FRAND standards were common, and that’s perfectly true. But in the world of software, the key modern forums for standards such as W3C or OASIS require RF, not FRAND. So this is a crude attempt to force old-fashioned hardware approaches on modern software, because once again the convenient result is that open source is excluded.