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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."
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.
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?
So what happens then if a particular "open" standard is abandoned and the existing viewers for the content grow insecure?
The same thing that happens when a proprietary standard is abandoned, except that the source code is freely available so the government can hire someone to maintain it.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software. Using OO Writer instead of Word for example. Sure, sounds simple, the nerds can probably fgure it out without blinking, but it is all the NON-NERDS who make it a very expensive idea to test. They all have to be trained, they lose some productivity for a while, they have to learn how to do new tricks that might be application specific and the like.
How do you think the cost of cross-training from Word 2003 to OpenOffice.Org (or LibreOffice) Writer would compare to cross-training from Word 2003 to Word 2007?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
>The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software. Using OO Writer instead of Word for example. Sure, sounds simple, the nerds can probably fgure it out without blinking, but it is all the NON-NERDS who make it a very expensive idea to test.
It's a freakin' word processor. That's all it is. A word processor isn't some esoteric specialized piece of software.
If you can't figure out a random word processor and use it, you should just be given an old Underwood manual typewriter and an OCR document scanner instead (do I hear cheers for this from some people?).
It's not rocket surgery, people. Word is not the be-all/end-all of document creation software. And the people who claim "but Writer doesn't have $ESOTERICFEATURE" don't realize (or deliberately ignore the fact) that 99 percent of people who use word processors use them as glorified typewriters with spell and grammar check and $ESOTERICFEATURE gets used *maybe* once a year, if that. (I asked people at work how often they used pivot tables, and the answer was "twice a year, maybe" and pivot tables was supposed to be /the/ defining feature of Word97)
People today aren't any different from people 25 years ago using DOS based Word Perfect without any GUI whatsoever. We didn't have all this bitching and moaning about training when companies migrated from WP to Word. They just did it. Sure the WP users bitched, but that's because Word is (and shall always be) inferior to WP, but "training" was never an issue.
What a bunch of crybabies the anti-OO people are.
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BMO
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
Learn your terminology. An advocate is somebody who speaks in favor of something. A lobbyist is somebody who bribes politicians so they vote in favor of something.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
In my experience, no one trains anyone on shit, which may be your point.
New computer, new OS, new office suite. It looks different? Tough shit, get back to work. Whether it was XP to Vista or 7. Or from Office03 to Office07 or Office2010... It may as well be OpenOffice, the same grumbling about menu items and behaviors that gradually subsides as people get back to work.
Hell, I deployed a bunch of ubuntu boxes in elementary schools for student use and purposely didn't tell anyone anything more than the logins just to see what would happen. They just figured it out, teachers and students alike. Not like they are doing VBA programming or something.
The "training" thing is a red herring MOST of the time.
THL phish sticks
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