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

Re:M$XML Fiasco is much in the news.

[Hairy Heron]

Hey twitter, how are you and your sockpuppets today?

Re:Profit? Crime has not paid.

[Darkness404]

Hmmm... Lets see.... If you were an A) Amiga person B) BeOS person or any other type of OS that wasn't MS, Apple or UNIX, your years of training suddenly were worthless. Now, you could probably still find employment but all of the training you got became worthless due to MS's monopoly, not because the software was bad but because of a monopoly.

Re:Some Choice Quotes

[dedazo]

bogus "intellectual property"

Bogus? Like I said yesterday, you constantly (and intentionally) confuse the concept of copyright and IP with the deficiencies in enforcement. You need to stop.

I wonder if anyone will bother to download it in that format.

I realize this is supposed to be some sort of funny, and I personally would probably not download it in DOC anyway, but I wonder if in whatever world you live in the dominating office suite is something that doesn't come from Microsoft?

Besides, it is funny that they offered the download in Word format considering the context. I'm sure it gives you stomach cramps, but that's besides the point. You do know Microsoft released full documentation for all of the Office binary formats, BTW?