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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?"
Governments make up for MOST of the IT market if you meassure it in dollars. A government unfriendly, by mandate, to open source solutions, and obvlivious as to why precisely in that market is Open Source so important, is a danger to the comercial viability of open source software.
NO SIG
There is a point there, what politicians want is a revenue stream to support them. Open source does not provide that. There is an advantage for slaves layman in open source or open technology, as they work less to achieve the same effect with open source, but this is counter to the interests of government. I doubt that anything that people say will be heard as the one common interest all political parties have is to keep the revenue stream and companies that sell products can take money from people and give it to them and in return they support monopolies and those who keep them in power.
If open source simply established a trust that sold compiled versions of open source software and used the money to <strike>bribe</strike> pay sales tax and place ads, they could possibly supplant Megalosoft..
I don't know WTF you're on about. Open. Do you understand what that means? Big companies (or individuals) are free to make pay, gratis, or open source software that works with the standard, and we can use whatever we'd like. It's a win for consumers all around.
The alternative is a proprietary standard is implemented, the owner definitely profits. If you want to implement a alternative program, it's a pain in the ass to reverse engineer compatibility, and generally lags the proprietary version. Less choice for the consumer, not something I'd want enacted in law.
Sent from my PDP-11
You don't understand the mind of a MS apologist. Bill Gates does not need a reality distortion field like Steve Jobs has. Each MS apologists comes with one pre-installed. No reality can enter their world.
The guy you are responding hasn't read the article because he can't. He sees nothing. It is not even a void. A void is an absence, to him there is not even nothing to not exist.
They pretend Bing is going to kick googles ass, then just a few months later when MS itself says they lost, they ignore it. They ignore everything that doesn't suit them because it doesn't fit into how their world works.
And really, you got to feel sorry for them. At least Jobs fanboys get Apple goodies. What do MS apologists get? The zune. Whee! But don't worry, version X+1 will fix it all. Like windows mobile 7. No multi-tasking (unlike promised) and no copy&past. But don't worry, this is not actually a problem. A true MS apologists can smoothly go from claiming that WM7 is superior because it has multi-tasking to how it is superior because it doesn't.
You got to admire an apologists who can claim in a story were MS is trying to chance favoring opensource and claim they are not worried about it in the same post. Amazing. I for one applaud him. Or pity. Or ridicule. My English is not that good, which is the one where you point and go "HAHA"?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ahem. Tilting over to proprietary software won't create more jobs. It will simply just allow vendors to A) sell more copies, and B) increase the amount of money that *leaves* the economy, since most of it would go to out of EU businesses, as opposed to if local companies handled the open source job opportunities. So common sense would dictate that if what you're suggesting, the proprietary vendors should be given the finger. Unfortunately they can pay for better dinners, and more wine.
Because they want to make money just like the corporations who will sell the software based on those open standards?
Apparently by competing with said corporations in the halls of the bureaucrats, rather than in the open market.
Shame on you, Microsoft. You used to say 'I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this.' Now you're buying governments just like Larry Ellison does.
OK, ducomputergeek and the person who modded this insightful: What is the "vision of Europe" laid out by Hitler? I've read the book and I thought it was boring rambling without any real vision...
I think dropping the bit about murdering all the Jews and gypsies and enslaving almost everyone else is a fairly significant difference, even if some bits of economic policy are similar.
Amusing, but also sheds some light on the misinformation that spread after the war ended. I am not that old, and even I grew up in Norway being taught that the Americans came to our aide, saved us from torment, and got us back on our feet. The Marshall Plan was useful yes, but why did America go to war? Was it to aide his fellow man, or because after years of war in Europe they finally felt threatened?
Depending on what you consider "the end of the war", it would be just as fair (if not more) to say that the Soviet evil empire liberated Europe. They invaded Berlin and soon after the Reich fell. Nobody taught me that in school. Maybe because of the rape and murder spree that occurred in Berlin after its fall, due to inebriated Russian soldiers. Maybe because of the cold war that ensued.
> it doesn't even make sense arguing _against_ document standardization,
> nor it makes sense to even immagine a proposal of not having document
> not using an open standard
When your company uses 95% *.doc(x), 4.9% *.pdf and 0.1% oddball formats, then arguing for open standards and OpenDocument in particular, elicits as much as a lookin-at-you-weird-smile.. Then they'll go right back to work, consisting of debating how to best implement Windows 7. As much as it sucks and I personally hate it: DOC *IS* the standard.!
Strange as it may seem, although the company I work for use word and *.doc, whenever I received a .docx file from an external source, it was opened perfectly well by my install of OpenOffice. So well, in fact, I assumed for a while that docx was the Open Office format!
Later I was told there was a plug in for our version of word for .docx files, so I installed it. Ironically, that now sometimes fails!