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Lobbyists Attack UK Open Standards Policy
superglaze writes "The Business Software Alliance, a lobbying organisation representing the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Apple, has laid into the UK's recently-adopted policy of mandating the use of open standards wherever possible in government IT systems.The policy describes open standards as being "publicly available at zero or low cost" and having "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis" The BSA said this would "inadvertently reduce choice [and] hinder innovation", and even went so far as to claim open standards would lead to higher e-government costs, but open-source advocates say the policy reflects how much the European Interoperability Framework is weighted in favour of the proprietary software companies."
I'm personally full supporting a move away from proprietary software in government, it can only be a move for the good.
Leave it to lobbyists to come up with their own unique and twisted logic....
Proprietary = choice
Openness = restricted
Freedom = anti-competitive
Free cost = expensive
Closed = innovation
I am sure the governments will do the "right" thing, and do whatever the lobbyist push on them, as has been seen time and time again.
So what happens then if a particular "open" standard is abandoned and the existing viewers for the content grow insecure?
the otherwise good policy means some of the BSA's members will lose their monopolies, and opportunities to create new ones in the future.
We can't have the public interest taking precedence over someone's profits, can we?
where ever we are. scary crowd to say the least
By Carl Teichrib:
â€The Georgia Guidestones, a massive granite edifice planted in the Georgia countryside, contains a list of ten new commandments for Earthâ€s citizens. The first commandment, and the one which concerns this article, simply states; â€Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.â€
Robert Walker, former chair of PepsiCo and Proctor & Gamble on water:
Water is a gift of nature. Its delivery is not. It must be priced to insure it is used sustainably.
Mikhail Gorbachev:
â€We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there arenâ€t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.â€
Jacques Cousteau UNESCO Courier 1991:
â€In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day.â€
Jacques Cousteau, Population: Opposing Viewpoints:
â€If we want our precarious endeavor to succeed, we must convince all human beings to participate in our adventure, and we must urgently find solutions to curb the population explosion that has a direct influence on the impoverishment of the less-favoured communities. Otherwise, generalized resentment will beget hatred, and the ugliest genocide imaginable, involving billions of people, will become unavoidable.â€
â€Uncontrolled population growth and poverty must not be fought from inside, from Europe, from North America, or any nation or group of nations; it must be attacked from the outside – by international agencies helped in the formidable job by competent and totally non-governmental organizations.â€
David Rockefeller: Memoirs 2002 Founder of the CFR:
â€We wield over American political and economical institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as â€internationalists†and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political structure, one world, if you will. If thatâ€s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.â€
David Rockefeller, Co-founder of the Trilateral Commission:
â€We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine & other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promise of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plans for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American Case Officer for the State Departmentâ€s Office of Population Affairs (OPA) (now the US State Dept. Office of Population Affairs, est. by Henry Kissinger in 1975): â€There is a single theme behind all our work -we must reduce population levels,†said Thomas Ferguson, the Latin American case officer for the State Departmentâ€s Office of Population Affairs (OPA). â€Either they [governments] do it our way, through nice clean methods or they will get the kind of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran, or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it. â€The professionals,†said Ferguson, â€arenâ€t interested in lowering population for humanitarian reasons. That sounds nice. We look at resources and environmental constraints. We look at our strategic needs, and we say that this country must lower its population -or else we will have
Sounds a bit like extended warranties on consumer electronics. If the deal is really a benefit to you and not some money-grubbing scheme, then why do they try SOO hard to sell them to you?
The shareholders can't be pleased about the open standards policy. Where's the lock in? Wheres the high profits? Where's the barrier to competition? With an open standards policy, you can't lock out competition! Its an open playing field! You can't make money like the Borgias with policies like that! Customers have choice! The BSA has to SCREAM at governments and scare them into reversing its decision! Otherwise, anyone can offer the government services, and at a competitive price! It could even be that even if you win a contract and deliver, if the customer doesn't like your service, they could switch mid stream, if a competitor has a lower price and lock you out! 3rd party outfits could disrupt profit channels!!! You have to expense people to provide quality service all the time! ALL THE TIME!!! Think how that could eat into profits. This is a black day for shareholders, a black day!
Can't wait until Britain is put on the US's "Special 301 Report Watchlist" for using FOSS. I hope Britain tells the US to fuck off, but they'll probably cave.
Ultimately, the BSA should just STFU and go away. Open Source reduces costs to the tax payer because the software plus licenses do not have to be purchased. In these economic times, it makes sense to cut costs in this way. Additionally, open source takes fewer people to support because it is generally more reliable. If Windows XP and Server families are any indication, it takes a veritable army of support personnel to keep it operational. Save money, ditch Microsoft!
BSA = Bull Shit Association?
Maybe I'm a little bit in the minority here, but can you blame them?
If you owned a company, and one of your major clients was thinking about moving to another company, would you not try everything in your power to keep them?
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Notice how keywords appear in corporations' or their lobbyists', or their lackey politicians speeches : "jobs, innovation, choice, market, consumer, economy"
sprinkle a few keywords in roundspeak, and you can issue a corporate statement portraying you as the innovator, despite you are doing everything in your power to feudalize intellectual activity on the planet through patents and make everyone pay to you as overlords.
gotta love roundspeak.
it is possible to crap in the middle of your granny's living room and then defend the action as an act of choice, liberty and act of cleanliness. (because you didnt crap in the fridge, instead of crapping in the middle of living room. that could be much worse - so, see, your better off !! )
Read radical news here
This is standard operating procedure for Microsoft. They use BSA or CompTIA to attack any open standards policy that is worthy of the name "open".
One way to point out the absurdity of their logic is to replace the reference to standards with references to any other useful technology that a government might adopt, like electrical standards.
For example:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/04/embrace-reality-and-logic-of-choice.html
And what's wrong with that? They advocate on behalf of their members, but they don't say that their members' software and formats are the only option. Use whatever works!
The beauty of choice!
Are open-source advocates somehow NOT "lobbyists"?
Let's not pretend there's not money to be made by open source supporters. Windows admins might be replaced by Linux admins, but the money would still be spent. It's just going to someone else, and I'm not going to accept for one second that Linux admins somehow "deserve" to have a job more than Windows admins. As for licensing... just about any IT department can tell you that the license cost of a major software system is by no means the biggest cost of deploying and maintaining that software, particularly when scaled to the levels being discussed.
I'm not saying open source is "better" or "worse"... there are completely valid philosophical arguments in both directions, as well as completely valid financial arguments. What I am saying is that the automatic knee-jerk demonizing of any and all proprietary commercial software has no place in policy-making, particularly when the money you're trying to tell people how to spend is taken by threat of force from everyone around you. You do what works best, not what feels fuzziest.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
<SARCASM>
Have they confirmed that all that FLOSS was properly licensed? Do they have the receipts as well as the COA's?
</SARCASM>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
1. Publish some idea that would benefit the general public but not various companies.
2. Wait for contributions from said companies.
3. Profit!
The BSA said this would "inadvertently reduce choice [and] hinder innovation",
You mean the choice for big companies to gouge others on the price of royalties? You mean like hinder the innovative ways that big companies come up with ways to gouge others on the price of royalties?
Corporate C*O welfare lobbyist creating the global corporate-socialism state. Eliminate the unknowns of innovation and competition from the economy to provide a market with greater corporate-stability. May the godddds help them, not US or EU.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Sure Apple's consumer software is all closed up & proprietary, but come on most of OS X is Open Source & relies on open standards - that's one of the reasons that my government employer bought into Apple's enterprise offerings. Heck, even the text editor that is built into OS X supports the OpenDocument Text format (.odt).
Considering all of the other BSA members, this seems to me like it should have been posted in a different category...
Goatse, please mod parent into oblivion...
The BSA said this would "inadvertently reduce choice [and] hinder innovation", and even went so far as to claim open standards would lead to higher e-government costs, but open-source advocates say the policy reflects how much the European Interoperability Framework is weighted in favour of the proprietary software companies."
The BSA inadvertently choose the right letters for Bull Shit Association. Was it on purpose or just a coincidence? You decide!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software.
The issue is NOT cost of the software, cost or difficulty of the training, or difficulty of operation.
The issue is whether bureaucrats, for their own convenience (or pocket-lining), can be allowed to lock up government documents and government interactions in the proprietary format of a US corporation.
Doing so puts the government and the people, from then on, at the mercy of the corporation. The entire population is faced with the choice of paying ongoing tribute to the corporation or suffering a severe impediment and competitive disadvantage when dealing with their own government or attempting to access its records. (They call certain licensing fees "royalties" for a reason.)
With open formats and FOSS tools there might be a learning curve and (if the corporations are to be believed) some reduced functionality or slightly increased difficulty of operation. But nobody is excluded or unnecessarily handicapped and all records stay accessible to all forever.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What we see today as the Internet, it's only possible because of the Open Standards. I'm not even talking about Free Software, I'm talking about real open standards which provides intercomunication between different systems, different worlds. There is no reasonable reason to governments avoid open standards, when them do this you can be sure that 'someone' are profiting.
war is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength
Is it long term data readability? To be able to click on a 100 year old lease document?
To avoid lockin? The ability for multiple products from multiple vendors to read the same data? The old minimum 3 vendor rule?
To be able to not pay the IT company, with no fear of the shafted IT company withholding the source or shutting down IT operations until they get paid, then hand all the source code and work products to a lowball bidder in India?
Why do they not write their own spec? It can't take more than a week to define what a word processor does. Then get multiple bids, sign the top 3 vendors. Own the source and the spec. Or make the spec open.
True multiple vendors, open specs and long term reliability and readability, that sounds expensive. A minimum of 3 viable vendors plus a standards committee? Mac, Windows and Linux are all a lot cheaper than that.
But all in all, it is too late for Big Government and Big Orgs. They have 20 or 30 years worth of Word Documents. They are locked in.
Just phone up Bill, Steve or Linus and ask for a discount already. Here's a tip. Talk to them nice. Can the threats and the drama.
It is much too late to reinvent the wheel.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software. Using OO Writer instead of Word for example
Applause for choosing the worst possible example. You don't really believe that yourself, do you? I have been writing documents for well over 30 years, using text editors, BRIEF, WordPerfect and practically every version of Word. These days I prefer to use OpenOffice for 3 reasons:
- it just works. It's slow to start, but it keeps working.
- it can handle corruption. I use OOo as a recovery tool when I get sent docs written by people using especially the latest version of Word. The "X" in .docx must stand for "scrameble at will", because the longer the docs get, the higher the probability that it'll crash, which is IMHO a result of cut & paste residue, a known Word problem
- its interface has remained stable, which is why I am looking with dismay at reports that some idiots are planning to copy the ribbon.
The MS Office ribbon has IMHO cost more productivity than all the other UI changes over the last decade put together
As for Open Standards in general, I was there when the first ones were established, and I also know why they were creatively "forgotten/adjusted" a few years later. Those who advocate Open Standards are right - it will save money.
Put bluntly, Open Standards were abandoned so consultancies could turn a profit recycling proprietary code. It's as simple as that.
Insert
What's going on /.? Used to be the most predictable thing on here; EU legislation infavorable to US companies => Hundreds of comments defending the poor US companies and damning the socialist EU.
This actually shows the hypocrisy of the Business Software Alliance who also "police" software licensing in UK businesses also.
Surely they should be *supporting* and *publicising* Open Source software as a legal alternative to software piracy?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
"The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software"
Perhaps the wording has been changed, but preferring open standards has been part of eGif for as long as I've been aware of it (which has to be at least 6 years now).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The definition of open standards provided in the document is fairly
good although there is a loophole in it when it states that open
standards "have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a
royalty free basis". This should in my opinion state "have ALL
intellectual property...".
The problem with the current definition is that a proposed standard
which makes use of one existing open, unencumbered standard, while
mandating the use of numerous other patent/copyright/royalty encumbered
intellectual properties, would be considered by the current definition
as an open standard - when this is obviously not the case!
Documents generated by and for the Government are OWNED BY THE PEOPLE (at least in the US). The people must not have to pay to access or process those documents. The people must not be required to purchase software to generate documents to be submitted to the Government (that would essentially be an additional tax but one paid directly to a corporation). Access must be unrestricted hence unencumbered by patents, trademarks, or copyright.
Those same documents must be accessible forever. Have you ever looked at census records from the 1800's or letters/official correspondence from 100 years ago? Whitehouse emails about the IRAQ war will be studied 100 years from now!
This even applies to classified material, most of which must eventually be disclosed in 10-50 years.
Because of these access, processing, and retention requirements, Government data is different than corporate data. Let corporations lock their data in proprietary formats, however this must not be the case for Governments. These open requirements are far stronger than other arguments such as retraining or lost revenue for local corporations.
Remember that it's your taxes paying for creation, processing, access, and very long-term retention of these documents.
The people who are making the decisions are familiar with Windows and they mostly wear suits. They understand, mostly, only Windows solutions and respect, mostly, other people who wear suits - and get paid lots of money.
They are basically fascists and respect only other powerful, dominant fascists like themselves. They don't care about saving money (no matter what they say), they care about being part of something which is dominant.
So you can stick your LInux because they don't respect the nerdy, environment caring, smart alec, do-gooders who are behind it. Give them a tough no nonsense winner any time.