This was interestingly the case he, Capatto asked whether also about the open source study that was withdrawn. The Council says it had no copy and he should rather go to the historic archives in Luxembourg. That is odd.
"...has not keep any copy of the Study. The Secretariat general suggests to ask a copy to the interistututional committee on informatics' archives."
The odd thing is that Cappato is a member of parliament. The legal base is EC/1049/2001 which grants citizens (and foreigners) a right of access to all EU documents (cmp. Art 255 EU Treaty)
Exceptions... 2. The institutions shall refuse access to a document where disclosure would undermine the protection of:
- commercial interests of a natural or legal person, including intellectual property,
- court proceedings and legal advice,
- the purpose of inspections, investigations and audits,
unless there is an overriding public interest in disclosure.
Of course a request by an MEP can be perceived as an indication that there is indeed a public interest. And a public contract is probably nothing which affects the "commercial interests" of an external enterprise, you would rather insist on full transparency.
Article 2
Beneficiaries and scope
1. Any citizen of the Union, and any natural or legal person residing or having its registered office in a Member State, has a right of access to documents of the institutions, subject to the principles, conditions and limits defined in this Regulation.
2. The institutions may, subject to the same principles, conditions and limits, grant access to documents to any natural or legal person not residing or not having its registered office in a Member State.
3. This Regulation shall apply to all documents held by an institution, that is to say, documents drawn up or received by it and in its possession, in all areas of activity of the European Union.
4. Without prejudice to Articles 4 and 9, documents shall be made accessible to the public either following a written application or directly in electronic form or through a register. In particular, documents drawn up or received in the course of a legislative procedure shall be made directly accessible in accordance with Article 12....
Article 3
Definitions
For the purpose of this Regulation:
(a) "document" shall mean any content whatever its medium (written on paper or stored in electronic form or as a sound, visual or audiovisual recording) concerning a matter relating to the policies, activities and decisions falling within the institution's sphere of responsibility;
There is a clear problem that US companies have too much influence, in particular companies like Microsoft which don't adapt to the fact that the European Union is no domestic market. The feel very much at home and bully officials and throw lobby money around. Citizens have an access problem and parliament not complete budget control rights.
Which shows that its all PR. Honestly, Microsoft Nigeria is just for public affairs, anti-piracy and penetration of "future markets". No one buys software licenses in Western Africa. Even Western companies residing there don't.
Yes, and Parliaments cannot see what is negotiated there, they don't even know the precise mandate of the Government to conclude this agreement and Eu bureaucrats admit that the objective is to impose IP enforcement regulation on "trade partners". According to EU officials part of it are civil and criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement and internet content filtering. The directive for criminal sanctions is currently stalled in the EU-Council because the EU level has no competence for that and the proposed measures were just disproportionate. And internet content filtering was kicked out of the Telcom package by the EU-Parliament after the lobby hijacked the telco regulation on committee stage. And sure the EU wants to export its IPR enforcement directive to the US. According to EU officials the reason of the pressure on the US side is that change was expected, regardless Obama or McCain and the anti-democratic trade nuts wanted to fix something before the change of administration. It is a kind of IP maximalist coup d'etat. Trade officials conspire to crack "down on piracy and counterfeiting" without any regard to proportionate legislation, balace of established law, democratic principles, the policies and principles of foreign trade policy as removal of trade barriers, etc. It is not the officials specialised on IPR policies who drive that but trade politicians who don't understand the current corpus of law and follow the principles of "more is better".
Now, ACTA is a maximalist tool, driven by ideological trade officials from many nations who want to jointly hijack the political deliberative process.
That is just the procedural stuff that is anti-democratic, anti-parliament, anti-expert, anti-constitution, pro-forum shopping, pro-maximalist, anti-free trade. The WTO and WIPO are not radical enough for them.
It was leaked, it is not published officially yet and includes very controversial statements such as the remark that the French Presidency is trying to find a way to get "criminal sanctions" in ACTA despite lack of EU competence which leaves it stalled or the planned lifting of the mere conduit principle for ISPs in line with wishes of the French presidency who aims for internet control, three strikes. See http://www.laquadrature.net/
It works in both directions. The EU and the US officials are very blunt about the objectives, namely to circumvent their national legislator and to impose legislative regimes on third nations.
What Europe has to offer is to internationalize IPRED1 standards (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive). Anton-Piller orders. Seizure of bank accounts and other torture instruments. They were pushed by Vivendi and rushed through before the Middle European member states joined.
Both nations want to get into content control and the Commission wants to weaken the "mere conduit" principle for ISPs.
IPRED2 about criminal sanctions is currently stalled because the EU lacks legislative competence. No problem says the EU. Let's make a treaty with the US where it is in.
I guess this can quickly pass when the software has all the convenience we want. OO.org 3 is a milestone in terms of user convenience. Microsoft Office can become the next internet explorer. It will still be dominant but a large part of the population and especially the tehcnologically savy users will take another product (firefox) because it is just better.
Once OO.org is ready it will be a landslide. For me OO3 is the first version which has parity with MS Office. And yes, I hate the Office07 user interface.
Exactly. The migration is Office 2003 to OpenOffice or Office07. It looks to me as if OO.org transition was easier. It all depends on OpenOffice penetration. The more people use it, the better.
And even more the wikipedia won't get affected because it is run by smart money.
Even if all contributors would stop today it would be still the best resource. As the stop of contributions is not going to happen it will get better and better.
And same for open source. Totally unaffected by the economic downturn except that it is gaining massive ground.
OpenOffice 3 is really a huge improvement for the user. It will make it more and more difficult for Microsoft to save its market. Just another domino, the cash cow of a company that needs to learn it the hard way. I mean Office 07 is a usability nightmare. I don't understand how to work with it. It is like Photoshop and GIMP, no thanks. OpenOffice 3 now also reads the infamous docx files.
Crude as they are - the statistics show a picture of slow disengagement by Sun, combined with a spectacular lack of growth in the developer community. In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.
Does this matter ? Of course, hugely ! Everyone that wants Free software to succeed on the desktop, needs to care about the true success of OpenOffice.org: it is a key piece here. Leaving the project to a single vendor to resource & carry will never bring us the gorgeous office suite that we need.
What can be done ? I would argue that in order to kick-start the project, there is broadly a two step remedy:
* Kill the ossified, paralysed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat. This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers. Once they are attracted and active, listen to them without patronizing.
* Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to 'share' all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.
29. Encourages Member States to recognise the social, cultural and economic value of allowing unlicensed users access to the dividend, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises and the not-for-profit sector, and thus increase the efficiency of spectrum use by concentrating such unlicensed uses in the currently unused frequencies (white spaces);
30. Calls for a step-by-step approach in this field; is of the opinion that effects for smaller networks - especially local wireless networks - for which no license requirements currently apply must be taken into account and that universal access to broadband, especially in rural areas, should be promoted;
31. Calls on Member States to support enhanced cooperation measures between spectrum management authorities to consider areas where unlicensed white space spectrum allocation would allow new technologies and services to emerge so as to foster innovation;
32. Encourages Member States to consider, in the context of allocating white space, the needs for unlicensed open access to spectrum by non-commercial and educational service providers and local communities which are driven by a public service mission;...
43. Supports a common and balanced approach to the use of digital dividend, allowing both broadcasters to continue offering and expanding their services and electronic communications operators to use this resource to deploy new services addressing other important social and economic uses, but stresses that in any case the digital dividend should be allocated on a technology-neutral basis;
44. Stresses that spectrum policy needs to be dynamic and must enable broadcasters and communications operators to employ new technologies and develop new services, allowing them to continue to play a key role in achieving the objectives of cultural and media policy, while also providing new high-quality communications services;
45. Stresses the potential benefits in terms of economies of scale, innovation, interoperability and the provision of potential pan-European services of a more coherent and integrated spectrum planning at Community level; encourages Member States to work together and with the Commission to identify common spectrum sub-bands of the digital dividend for different application clusters that could be harmonised on a technology-neutral basis;
46. Believes that clustering within the UHF band should be based on a bottom-up approach according to the specifics of the national markets while ensuring that harmonisation at community level takes places wherever this creates a clear added value;
47. In order to achieve a more efficient use of spectrum and to facilitate the emergence of innovative and successful national, cross-border and pan-European services, supports a coordinated approach at Community level , based on different clusters of the UHF spectrum for uni-directional and bi-directional services, taking into account the potential for harmful interference arising from the co-existence of different types of networks in the same band, the outcomes of the ITU Geneva RRC 06 and WRC 07 and the existing authorisations;...
51. Requests the Commission to conduct a study on conflicts between users of open source software and certification authorities concerning software defined radios;
52. Asks the Commission to propose steps for a reduction of legal liabilities in the context of wireless mesh network provision;
Slashdot Mirror
This was interestingly the case he, Capatto asked whether also about the open source study that was withdrawn. The Council says it had no copy and he should rather go to the historic archives in Luxembourg. That is odd.
"...has not keep any copy of the Study. The Secretariat general suggests to ask a copy to the interistututional committee on informatics' archives."
Marco Capatto is also pro-Free Software
And other MEPs are asking questions as well: Georgios Papastamkos (PPE-DE) to the Commission: Commission's procurement of computer software
The odd thing is that Cappato is a member of parliament. The legal base is EC/1049/2001 which grants citizens (and foreigners) a right of access to all EU documents (cmp. Art 255 EU Treaty)
Of course a request by an MEP can be perceived as an indication that there is indeed a public interest. And a public contract is probably nothing which affects the "commercial interests" of an external enterprise, you would rather insist on full transparency.
Have a look at the Document register of the Council
There is a clear problem that US companies have too much influence, in particular companies like Microsoft which don't adapt to the fact that the European Union is no domestic market. The feel very much at home and bully officials and throw lobby money around. Citizens have an access problem and parliament not complete budget control rights.
That their is an act which prohibits it.
Don't forget that a guy Microsoft hired from Nigeria is a relative of him. Dare Obasanjo.
And then there is the Obeto nut job.
Which shows that its all PR. Honestly, Microsoft Nigeria is just for public affairs, anti-piracy and penetration of "future markets". No one buys software licenses in Western Africa. Even Western companies residing there don't.
Yes, and Parliaments cannot see what is negotiated there, they don't even know the precise mandate of the Government to conclude this agreement and Eu bureaucrats admit that the objective is to impose IP enforcement regulation on "trade partners". According to EU officials part of it are civil and criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement and internet content filtering. The directive for criminal sanctions is currently stalled in the EU-Council because the EU level has no competence for that and the proposed measures were just disproportionate. And internet content filtering was kicked out of the Telcom package by the EU-Parliament after the lobby hijacked the telco regulation on committee stage. And sure the EU wants to export its IPR enforcement directive to the US. According to EU officials the reason of the pressure on the US side is that change was expected, regardless Obama or McCain and the anti-democratic trade nuts wanted to fix something before the change of administration. It is a kind of IP maximalist coup d'etat. Trade officials conspire to crack "down on piracy and counterfeiting" without any regard to proportionate legislation, balace of established law, democratic principles, the policies and principles of foreign trade policy as removal of trade barriers, etc. It is not the officials specialised on IPR policies who drive that but trade politicians who don't understand the current corpus of law and follow the principles of "more is better".
Now, ACTA is a maximalist tool, driven by ideological trade officials from many nations who want to jointly hijack the political deliberative process.
That is just the procedural stuff that is anti-democratic, anti-parliament, anti-expert, anti-constitution, pro-forum shopping, pro-maximalist, anti-free trade. The WTO and WIPO are not radical enough for them.
http://action.ffii.org/acta/Analysis
Make some noise, spread the news about ACTA and its gone.
The question is why did they know about it and who was the source of the hack. It could well be simple rumour.
In short it means that these institutions guard the campaign parties and monitor their internet.
President B. Obama asks Ballmer to release Windows 3.1 sources while Ballmer rebrands Microsoft as communism and promotes "local software".
No, not the Nazis, the internet users and online businesses. Imagine the proposals were available when Youtube was in its infancy.
It was leaked, it is not published officially yet and includes very controversial statements such as the remark that the French Presidency is trying to find a way to get "criminal sanctions" in ACTA despite lack of EU competence which leaves it stalled or the planned lifting of the mere conduit principle for ISPs in line with wishes of the French presidency who aims for internet control, three strikes. See http://www.laquadrature.net/
It works in both directions. The EU and the US officials are very blunt about the objectives, namely to circumvent their national legislator and to impose legislative regimes on third nations.
What Europe has to offer is to internationalize IPRED1 standards (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive). Anton-Piller orders. Seizure of bank accounts and other torture instruments. They were pushed by Vivendi and rushed through before the Middle European member states joined.
Both nations want to get into content control and the Commission wants to weaken the "mere conduit" principle for ISPs.
IPRED2 about criminal sanctions is currently stalled because the EU lacks legislative competence. No problem says the EU. Let's make a treaty with the US where it is in.
Install LXDE and it gets fast.
Maybe it should be a package: The essential tools for turning Windows into a productivity tool: firefox, thunderbird, azureus, OpenOffice...
I guess this can quickly pass when the software has all the convenience we want. OO.org 3 is a milestone in terms of user convenience. Microsoft Office can become the next internet explorer. It will still be dominant but a large part of the population and especially the tehcnologically savy users will take another product (firefox) because it is just better.
Once OO.org is ready it will be a landslide. For me OO3 is the first version which has parity with MS Office. And yes, I hate the Office07 user interface.
Exactly. The migration is Office 2003 to OpenOffice or Office07. It looks to me as if OO.org transition was easier. It all depends on OpenOffice penetration. The more people use it, the better.
And even more the wikipedia won't get affected because it is run by smart money.
Even if all contributors would stop today it would be still the best resource. As the stop of contributions is not going to happen it will get better and better.
And same for open source. Totally unaffected by the economic downturn except that it is gaining massive ground.
Exactly, O7 sucks, is there any petition for getting the old menu back? Really an argument for OpenOffice 3 which is a perfect replacement.
OpenOffice 3 is really a huge improvement for the user. It will make it more and more difficult for Microsoft to save its market. Just another domino, the cash cow of a company that needs to learn it the hard way. I mean Office 07 is a usability nightmare. I don't understand how to work with it. It is like Photoshop and GIMP, no thanks. OpenOffice 3 now also reads the infamous docx files.
Oh, yeah. McCain is the Microsoft lobby.
What are they doing at OO.org? This should not happen!
OpenOffice 3 is much better than 2.4. More stable and mature.
However, the criticism of Meeks concerns me.
Novell's Meeks critisised the development process of SUN. Novell forked OO.org.
NeoOffice claims that it speeds up the OO.org 3 series.
So maybe the problem is SUN Microsystems and their red tape.
Btw, the link to the Paris Party
In the EU Patrizia Toia recently got a similar report adopted by the European Parliament.