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.'"

Comments

Well it was inevitable really

[damburger]

Time is clearly the legislatures of the world of old men who think the Internet is a series of tubes and they are being replaced by people who at least slightly more tech savvy.

Interesting.

[jd]

Europe does a lot of stupid things, but it also does some amazingly brilliant things. This speech is brilliant, let's hope the follow-up isn't stupid. It's definitely a jab at Microsoft, but it's also a jab at ISO in the comments about not rushing things. I think Europe is most displeased with what is going on, or at least some senior figures within it. This does need to translate to action. Possibly on more than one front. If the European Courts are presented with evidence that Microsoft hijacked the ISO standards procedure in an effort to "comply" with prior rulings in a dishonest way, I imagine the court would not be pleased. Could it be considered contempt of court to attempt to mislead the court over compliance? Does the EU court system even have such a concept? If not, can/will the judges increase the fines to reflect the seriousness of the situation? Or given Microsoft's continual appeals and non-payment, are there any other penalties they can exact, such as suspending the business license for Microsoft's European branch?

Re:Interesting.

[CdBee]

"Strict gun-control, stupid "hate speech" laws"

Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...

Re:Interesting.

[Creepy Crawler]

Hmm. Gun control laws... I thought it was mandatory that every able citizen keep a fully automatic weapon+bullets in Switzerland. But we dont see the violence levels there as we do in America. I wonder if we can attribute that to American Media? (I would, due to Bhutan- look it up on wikipedia).

Guns/weapons do not make violence. Violence comes from people who act violent. Stopping the majority of this violence will require reviewing the source of the violent actions in people, regardless of preconceptions. Is it from the media? Is it from less religious influence? Is it from single parent households? Is it from the disparity of wealth?

And Hate speech, according to whom? Should we not allow vitriol that some people spout be public, for surely intelligent people would realize it for what it is? I mean, we in the USA have the KKK, who hates blacks and Catholics. Fair enough. We even allow them to demonstrate *peacefully*, even though everybody knows what they say is just wrong on all points. We view that they have a point, even if horridly invalid.

Determining "Hate Speech" is just like "Obscenity Laws". Ill know it when I see it.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was mandatory that every able citizen keep a fully automatic weapon+bullets in Switzerland. That is a myth. Some (not every able citizen) men and women (but mainly men between the ages of 20-35) who do military service may have a weapon (generally a rifle) at home depending on what branch of the military they are performing service for. They are trained in the correct use and handling of that weapon. Though sadly violence still happens. There have been a number of incidents resulting in fatalities. Recently a young girl was snipered while waiting for a bus in zurich.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/detail/Gun_laws_under_fire_after_latest_shooting.html?siteSect=105&sid=8470114&cKey=1196182039000&ty=st

There is debate happening in Switzerland to create stricter gun laws to reduce the possibility of fatal tragedy. It might be true that guns/weapons may not make violence, but they make killing innocent people a hell of a lot easier if you are in a angry/violent/disturbed mood and you have a loaded weapon. The argument for gun control laws is that restricting access to weapons might prevent needless death.

Generally violence in people stems from human emotions.
I wish everybody luck in controlling how we all naturally may potentially behave. I just hope you do not have a weapon if you slip up.

It's the whole world.

[Odder]

No one likes corruption and everyone is fed up with Microsoft. Kroes has done a fine job of expressing some of the world's contempt, but anywhere there's technical competence people are angry about the ISO hijack. South African, Brazilian and Indonesian citizens have all piped up. World wide corruption has produced world wide derision which will be followed by rejection.

Re:Profit? Crime has not paid.

[Bert64]

Simple...

It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it... BeOS was great, but it wasn't compatible with microsoft and ultimately doomed.
Open source is barely competing, despite the obvious price advantage.

Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed...

Novell faced a similar fate...

It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... The only way to compete is very slowly through open source, leveraging the lack of cost and advantages of distributed development. Even then, the process of winning market share over from microsoft is far too slow to make a business selling competing software.

Richard Stallman

[Enderandrew]

Many of us benefit from his contributions, and I am grateful for that, but RMS is also a crack-pot and his statements must be taken with a grain of salt.

It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic.

I'm all for advocating freedom, open source, and open standards. I also believe that these causes are best fought by level-headed folk. Acting like a crack-pot only makes the whole cause look bad.

Search your feelings Skywalker, you know it to be true.

Re:Richard Stallman

[moreati]

I have to take issue with you there on a couple of points. Stallman is a fanatic and he has entered crack pot country before. I happen to think he's right much of the time.

I take issue with:

It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic.

1. Equating Stallman's fanaticism for free software, with the popular view of religious fanaticism is nothing but trolling. He isn't violent and he doesn't threaten bombings or beheading.
2. Fanaticism in the sense that Stallman portrays it is a good thing.
3. Demonstrably some people disagree with 'fanaticism is never good'. The fanatics quite like the idea for a start. Non-violent fanatics are a good thing, if only to remind us where we could do better/go further toward a goal.

Alex.

Insightful Troll.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Parent might be worded as a troll, but it is also insightful -- it is scary as hell that the people (Ted Stevens) most directly responsible for legislating the future of the Internet are so completely clueless as to the nature of the beast.

I don't mean that every congressman needs to become an expert on every niche domain of knowledge humans have ever dreamed of -- but at the very least, if you're going to legislate something, learn something about it, or delegate to someone who has.

Fanatics...

[js_sebastian]

Many of us benefit from his contributions, and I am grateful for that, but RMS is also a crack-pot and his statements must be taken with a grain of salt. It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic. I have no trouble admitting stallman is a fanatic. But when he started writing free software, you had to be crazy to think you could have a whole free software ecosystem.. build tools, kernel, libraries...

Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...

Re:the MacOS is dead

[fabs64]

OSX is not an operating system, it's a whole heap of (very well done) toolkits and apps bundled with a *nix operating system.

Read your Tanenbaum son.

Re:Profit? Crime has not paid.

[Rycross]

I wouldn't call a recruiter that recruits programmers for languages they're not experienced in morons. Maybe they're one of the few recruiters who realizes that a good developer can learn new technologies. And thats my point.

No technology lasts forever in its current state. Even the Linux now is different from the Linux 10 years ago. Good developers and admins keep learning and adapt. Bad ones don't. If you cannot work in the IT industry because the technology you learned is no longer used, then you destroyed your own career, not anyone else. You're responsible for making yourself marketable.

Re:Full Text

[Rycross]

Off topic again. No problem. I wanted to give you a chance to explain before the trolls came in. I don't see eye-to-eye with you on a lot of things but flaming people doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion.

Re:Profit? Crime has not paid.

[Rycross]

Well, if FOSS wipes out some other technology, should I complain that FOSS is destroying my career? Or should I be responsible for keeping my own skills marketable? Me, I figured "Hey I should learn some of this Linux stuff" so I installed Ubuntu on a spare machine and made a personal server. If Linux wiped out Windows tomorrow, I'm confident I'd be able to find a new job.