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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.'"
Neelie Kroes rules. She makes me proud to be Dutch. That does not happen too often. Soccer be damned.
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm not sure how Microsoft is destroying peoples' careers. I mean, I'm a .Net developer and get offers for Java, C++, etc positions, so I can't imagine how Microsoft could kill someones' career unless they do not keep up with the latest technologies.
Advertisements aren't squandering money either. It one way you generate public knowledge and interest in your product, which translates into sales. And I'm not sure that I'd put advertising in the same breath as corruption unless your advertisement strategy is unethical.
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.
should Microsoft decide to step straight into the fist as it's flying, that's their right. but then don't come whining about being decked by a girl.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
And he probably got confused, he posted the same thing to a Firehose submission and didn't read the one that actually made it to the front page.
When you're in a desperate rush to stock up on karma and shill your own posts you tend to make those mistakes, I guess.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
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.
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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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...
"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."
From my experience, it is a sad fact that people won't realise this - however much you try to suggest that there's no point paying £200 for an office suite when they only use the bits that come in the free one.
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 on MSOffice.
However, what is more interesting is that people will tend to try firefox over internet explorer, despite IE being free.
So maybe people do value that 10% they pay £200 for, even if they don't use it. Or do people just distrust free software, having had bad experiences of malware. Or is it just a large case of corporate brainwashing?
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.
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.
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.
It's still gaining market share, therefore the OS is not dead.
You are still misunderstanding. No one said OSX is dead. MacOS died at version 9, and OSX replaced it. OSX is a *NIX based operating system. Thus the statement that only UNIX and Windows remain.Hopefully that is straight forward enough. OSX is a Unix varient, and very much alive.
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.