It is also important to note that for all intensive an diy project could receive a certification.
Also if you read the first line of that wikipedia article:
"Reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms, also known as fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, denote a voluntary licensing commitment that standards organizations often request from the owner of an intellectual property right (usually a patent) that is, or may become, essential to practice a technical standard."
Reading between the lines, the point of the "intellectual property" is that it is the leverage has over companies. Without patents EOMA is only a word and EOMA has no legal authority to stop imitators from just using a slightly different word. With a patent however, a standards organization can legally issue a cease-and-desist order.
So this brings up the tough question of how can the EOMA standard exert any authority without patents?
Also what will motivate companies to hire Luke as a consultant? That's important too, am I wrong?
Community support through donations wins Luke a certain degree of independence, so Luke won't have to charge many people consultation fees and can give advice more-solely based on merit. Here's an interesting question though: what motivates people to donate and will that scale as more companies gain interest causing Luke to inevitably need to train people to act as consultants on behalf of the EOMA project? My hope is, yes.
One way to have leverage is for EOMA to become so popular, companies without the mark are actively avoided by a significant fraction of the population in given places. This is not to be underestimated, because food certifications have demonstrated a lot of success with this strategy.
However we should also consider: The patent system isn't necessarily broken, if we consider the rampant abuse to be the result of scammers. We could see copyleft "public commons" patents which are licensed openly to the public so long as certain rules pertaining to certain morals are followed. Like with GPL violations, any member of the public should be able to make a lawsuit against a violator of these rules.
With that possibility in mind, abuse could get worse with copyleft principles, because rules could be stupid or misguided. FRAND already comes into play with that, so there is already an appeals mechanism in place against abusive copyleft or open patent licenses (if I understand correctly). Perhaps patent courts could expand to judge as fair or unfair the rules of an open patent license. Then such standards organizations could form around protecting people and certain morals, by prosecuting violators of these open patents. Ultimately this could easily turn into an extortion racket with people living off of legal and consultation fees. Such an organization should live solely on donations and only conduct legal cases pro-bono.
This is were things get weird.
Aren't you asking, "wait if you just implied we should consider living off of consultation and legal fees immoral extortion, why are you defending patents as a form of leverage used by companies who would be able to do that extortion.. you look like you're contradicting yourself up and down"?
Well, the fact remains the public benefits if the public shares the morals being protected. Legal cases write lots of documentation which the public might like to read, if well written. The more injustice an organization fights this way then the more journalism they have necessarily done and the more journalistic documents they can easily publish. This engineers a service that gratifies donors and will immediately stop if the donations also stop, motivating people not to be selfish.
EOMA standards organizations can also thoroughly document (through transcripts, or audio or video journalism) what they were consulted about and the advice given, so that it becomes easily apparent if they were warning a company that they were consulting for about potential violations or if they instead ever used consultation fees as a mode of extortion.
This mailing list shows EOMA off to a great start in terms open-ness and thorough journalistic documentation of everything going on. I fully support Luke and this project, and this is why I again draw connections between this project and the baby giant company Cloud Imperium Games, for their record-breakingly thorough self-journalism.
I know they aren't FLOSS, but we need to be like them.