Slashdot Mirror
Open Source, Open Standards Under Attack In Europe
Glyn Moody writes "A battle for the soul of European IT is taking place behind closed doors in Brussels. At stake is the key Digital Agenda for Europe, due to be unveiled in a month's time. David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens, tweeted last week: 'SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate "open standards" policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU.' This is confirmed by the French magazine PC Inpact (Google translation), which also managed to obtain a copy of the draft Digital Agenda (DOC). It's currently supportive of both open source and open standards — but for how much longer?"
Is it me or does Microsoft seem to be getting more and more desperate for control?
That's clearly very positive about open standards and open source. And then, back in November of last year, a draft version of the revised EIF was leaked [.pdf]. It revealed a staggering re-definition of what openness meant by suggesting that “closed” was part of the “openness continuum”:
Except that your claimed new definition doesn't claim that proprietary software is considered "open" and actually spins proprietary software in a very bad light:
and lie at one end of the spectrum while non-documented, proprietary specifications, proprietary software and the reluctance or resistance to reuse solutions, i.e. the "not invented here" syndrome, lie at the other end.
This definition is funny because one can come up with a number of examples of poor or non-existant documentation, NIH syndrome, a resistance to code reuse within OSS.
With the global slump politicians are under pressure to spend money on software, not use open source.
Of course, the layman doesn't always understand that open source software is sold commercially as well.
Under freedom of information laws surely we're entitled to see information in a format anyone can read?
The less "open standards" clusterfucks designed by committees of self-righteous idiots the better.
And how "open" is a standard really when the only people allowed in the committees are the representatives of multinational corporations? And let's not even get into the fact that if you want to get a copy of this "open" standard you usually have to pay hundreds of dollars.
I wonder if the ACTA plays into this?
Seems to me open standards would hinder a closed-sourced DRM scheme designed to limit communication.
"...which also managed to obtain a copy of the draft Digital Agenda (DOC). It's currently supportive of both open source and open standards — but for how much longer?"
Why am I even surprised that the agenda is in MS-Word's old binary file format? Maybe they're just supportive of open standards for other people, or for hypothetical people in a hypothetical world, perhaps.
coding is life
It's not "war". It's about non-violent totalitarianism, plain and simple. That's what the EU has always been about, and what it will always be about. It's about Germany and France controlling the rest of Europe, without having to resort to destructive wars like in the past. And for the most part, they've succeeded. Germany and France now dictate economic policy for countries like Greece, they dictate social policy, and now they dictate technological policies.
Sounds like a war to me.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Who cares if they are?
This is not some commie no money ideology. This about me not having to pay rent to MS to interact with my government.
No, I can use free as in beer software or write my own. I can even use an OS not from microsoft with such software!
It is terribly exciting and worrisome at the same time. Microsoft has dominated the world with Windows and by leveraging the OS, they are dominating is many other areas as well. They are unquestionably an abusive monopoly. With software patents and other intellectual property types creating road blocks and toll roads to innovation and less expensive solutions.
Open standards is one way to make sure things are fair to ensure that competition is alive and well. Microsoft cannot compete with others using open standards and expect to win every time. (I would have no problem if they conformed to open standards and actually offered a better product.) But instead of competing on the basis of quality, they lobby for laws and policies to change in their favor.
Microsoft is a corrupt company catering to corrupt politicians. I hope many EU leaders start to take offence to Microsoft's tactics and push back hard.
I'm sure Alabama feels the same way? They're having dictated social, educational, health, economic etc politics from DC.
While it is rather difficult to leave the EU, it's not impossible, whereas secession is apparently against the constitution of the US.
"Bill Gates does not need a reality distortion field like Steve Jobs has"
Bill Gates has very little to do with the running of MS these days.
You need to lookup the definition of Monopoly. Stop using words you don't actually know the meaning of. MS was never at any point a monopoly at anything other than selling its own products.
Abusive, certainly. Monopoly, never.
This isn't about Open Standards. The OSS world and slashdot in particular don't know the meaning of the word. In this context Open Standard pretty much translates to Our Standard. If it doesn't fit your perfect little world you throw it out as open or standard, while completely ignoring established/defacto standards because its suits you.
Make a better package that customers want.
You can't give it away. Its that bad that even being free, no one fucking wants it. TAKE THE HINT.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The U.S. population was self-involved and non-interventionist until Pearl Harbor. FDR had wanted to go to war in Europe for some time, but he couldn't get popular support. Much like George W. Bush's Iraq move, FDR used anger Pearl Harbor to leverage support for going to war with Germany (made easier by the Tripartite Pact).
Put identity in the browser.