Slashdot Mirror
EU Calls For Use of Open Standards
fondacio writes "In a speech that is being reported as taking a swipe at Microsoft, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has called for businesses and governments to use software based on open standards. While not mentioning Microsoft by name, Ms. Kroes referred to the fact that '[t]he [European] Commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case' until this befell Microsoft. The things she told a conference in Brussels will not come as a surprise to Slashdot readers, but it's encouraging to hear the following quotes from someone in her position: 'Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable... we should only standardize when there are demonstrable benefits, and we should not rush to standardize on a particular technology too early... I fail to see the interest of customers in including proprietary technology in standards when there are no clear and demonstrable benefits over non-proprietary alternatives.'"
Strict gun-control, stupid "hate speech" laws, raiding an entire ISP to find TPB and shutting all of the sites down, and censorship just to name a few.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You mean Richard Stallman has the opinion that it is a "bogus phrase".
No, but you are too wrapped up in your hatred of them that you need to pretend you're nine different people to try to see if someone agrees with you about their "demise", which if I remember correctly you've been promising since 1996. This thread is already polluted by three of your accounts, complete with the usual inane "M$" poetry you're so popular for.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I should definitely get me another two or three accounts and use them to complain about my "troll" moderations. Seems to work for twitter well enough.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Who modded this offtopic flamebait insightful?
It's taking time for the world to catch up with him, but people like Kroes are well on the way. It's a good idea to listen to people you don't agree with when they are obviously trying to do good things for you. It's also a good idea to take things with a grain of salt from convicted monopolists that talk about "one night stands" and pawn developers. Richard Stallman has taken a lot of heat for the things he's said but almost all of it has been correct. He'd be a much better person in authority than the real greed driven crackpots John McKain favors - Steve Ballmer and Carley Fiorina.
Intellectual property was the desert property of the twenth century.