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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.'"
It would have been nice to see a renunciation of software patents and the bogus "intellectual property" phrase too, but this is very close to that. After laying out the case for secret file formats, she demolishes it. The text is available in html, pdf and, ironically, DOC but I wonder if anyone will bother to download it in that format.
Unix and C has been with us since the beginning. Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period.
C will cannibalize any prior language on any platform (from stamps to supers). After that, Unix will not be long to follow, due to simple methods of controlling hardware/software.
Also, the MacOS is dead. Dead through and through. Unix and Windows are the only 2 choices. Just so happens that a company used the FreeBSD base and added a snazzy GUI.
Even since that, guess what is next to die? Microsoft. Why? OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people. When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that.
>Strict gun-control
Guess which country has third most hand weapons per capita in the world?
Answer: Finland.
And, lo and behold, Finland is in Europe!
The statement about monetary incentives is wrong because what the Commission just expects compliance with its rulings. Usually companies do comply. The competition authority acts similarly to a court. Competitors file a complaint, then the Commission rules, then the convicted monopolist complies. This is the way is works. Microsoft broken the rules and refused to comply, it delayed the process, bullied the Commission, lobbied aggressively, even let foreign nations intervene on their behalf.
The penalties are just for non-compliance, the difficulties of the myriads of Microsoft lobby outfits to "understand" what the Commission wants. When Microsoft sued the Commission it won just another enemy. Microsoft acted like a bully, bought politicians, harassed the Commission. This made so many people fed up. Parliament members file parliament questions on Microsoft. Lobbying for Microsoft got a pretty bad smell if you care about your career in public affairs.
Actually this doesn't matter at all as the ministries as users are irrelevant.
http://www.ososs.nl/noiv/en
The Netherlands will create a governmental lobby platform.
It is all about the domino effect, Microsoft is very afraid of it. The critical mass to get a massive shift. Microsoft will combat it and further worsen its position.
Not all fanatics are violent, but fanaticism is often unhealthy behavior. Fanaticism is often illogical. For instance, even when Jack Thompson has a point (little kids likely shouldn't be playing GTA) he can't really get credit for being correct because his logic is faulty. He has said that kids playing video games are "Manchurian Candidates ready to kill us all".
Fanaticism certainly doesn't win you brownie points when it comes to diplomacy. I thought we learned this lesson with Bush.
You insist that his fantaticism is a good thing. In the companies I've worked for, people won't go near OSS, and some of that is due to the reputation OSS gets via association with fanaticism.
Also, as a point of semantics, I define fanaticism as idealogy taken to an unhealthy/negative level. In that regard, fanatacism is never good, by definition. I believe a person can be revolutionary, and an idealist without a fanatic.
RMS once said he'd never sign a software license, and didn't agree with the concept of one, only to invent one. The GPLv2 was a great license. I'd argue the benefits outweighed the restrictions, but a license inherently is a series of restrictions. The GPLv3 is even more restrictive. He recent issued a release telling people to fear the government, and always pay in cash because the government was using the Oyster card system to track where you are at all times.
I won't advocate a Big Brother government, but frankly most Big Brother stuff is paranoid delusions, or security theater. Someone bombed a recruitment facility in New York City, and smiled at the camera right before he blew the place up.
London has cameras all over the place, not because the government knows where everyone is at all times (it takes an illogical amount of man power to fully spy on everyone) but to create an illusion of control that will hopefully disuade crime, though often it won't.
When the world decides on how seriously to take OSS as a crusade, RMS's paranoid rants don't help his cause. People associate the ideal with the person championing it.
The GPL allows for commercial software, but RMS has spoken in the past how all software should be free as beer as well. He has spoken out a number of times against commercial software, and long railed against many of the pillars of the OSS community for being commercial.
He is supposed to be a champion of freedom, of choice, yet in reality he wants everyone tied into a dichotomy of 100% free or nothing. He complains when people are given a choice of proprietary products *tainting* free ones. He fails to realize that a partial adoption of OSS technology is better than no adoption, and somtimes partial adoptions are the gateway to total adoptions.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
More importantly, it wasn't just the "series of tubes" comment -- you really need to go find an audio clip, and a transcript, and listen to it. He clearly has no fucking clue what he's talking about.
Here, let me elaborate: Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? Personal Internet? Mmmkay... Letting that one slide. I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Only four days! Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. Ok, I don't care how much YouTube or BitTorrent is slowing stuff down. I'm assuming for the moment that he's talking about email. And that simply cannot happen -- far more likely, it was a problem with the email server in question. And again -- not likely overload, but some actual, temporary error. the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. Note the fact that there's no "like" here. He didn't say that the Internet is like a series of tubes. He said that it is -- and it really seems like his level of understanding is exactly that. One wonders if he has a concept of the actual copper and fiber-optic that makes up the real Internet. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed Again with the complete, utter lack of understanding.=
Say it was just bandwidth.
What TCP connection is going to go for four days without any traffic? Or take that long to send an email, with minimal traffic?
Never mind that he seems to be assuming the email was a single packet, sitting in a single buffer behind a bunch of video packets, waiting to be sent along the...
But that's giving him too much credit.
It's not about the series of tubes. It's about the fact that Ted Stevens has no fucking clue what the Internet is -- and that he thinks he needs to explain it to the rest of the Senate. And the very, very scary possibility that he's right about that last part.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!