EU Calls For Use of Open Standards 199
fondacio writes "In a speech that is being reported as taking a swipe at Microsoft, EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has called for businesses and governments to use software based on open standards. While not mentioning Microsoft by name, Ms. Kroes referred to the fact that '[t]he [European] Commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case' until this befell Microsoft. The things she told a conference in Brussels will not come as a surprise to Slashdot readers, but it's encouraging to hear the following quotes from someone in her position: 'Where interoperability information is protected as a trade secret, there may be a lot of truth in the saying that the information is valuable because it is secret, rather than being secret because it is valuable... we should only standardize when there are demonstrable benefits, and we should not rush to standardize on a particular technology too early... I fail to see the interest of customers in including proprietary technology in standards when there are no clear and demonstrable benefits over non-proprietary alternatives.'"
ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ha! (Score:5, Funny)
Well it was inevitable really (Score:4, Insightful)
Time is clearly the legislatures of the world of old men who think the Internet is a series of tubes and they are being replaced by people who at least slightly more tech savvy.
Insightful Troll. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mean that every congressman needs to become an expert on every niche domain of knowledge humans have ever dreamed of -- but at the very least, if you're going to legislate something, learn something about it, or delegate to someone who has.
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I always wonder, do these people have no grandchildren who like to play with computers and do neat things with them ?
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That said, my grandmother is pretty damned cool. Other than the whitewater rafting (at 75!), she does use email -- more than the phone, most likely, as her hearing is mostly gone. So she's already more tech savvy than Ted Stevens.
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Well, how would you describe it (in layman's terms)?
Well, I'm frightened by the though that I would have to describe it to Congress in layman's terms -- that implies that they don't already know.
More importantly, it wasn't just the "series of tubes" comment -- you really need to go find an audio clip, and a transcript, and listen to it. He clearly has no fucking clue what he's talking about.
Here, let me elaborate:
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet?
Personal Internet? Mmmkay... Letting that one slide.
I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday].
Only four days!
Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Ok, I don't care how much YouTube or BitTorrent is slowing stuff down. I'm a
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Far, Far more likely, it was a problem with the *staffer* in question.
3:30 Monday: "Staffer, did you send me that memo I asked for?"
3:31 Monday: "Uh.. yeah, I sent that like 10 AM on friday, you didn't get it yet?"
11:30 Tuesday: staffer finally sends memo
11:30 Tuesday: Senator receives memo, blames interblag.
Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the whole world. (Score:5, Insightful)
No one likes corruption and everyone is fed up with Microsoft. Kroes has done a fine job of expressing some of the world's contempt, but anywhere there's technical competence people are angry about the ISO hijack. South African, Brazilian and Indonesian citizens have all piped up. World wide corruption has produced world wide derision which will be followed by rejection.
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This is wishful thinking on your part. Just wait till the next trade deal is up for negotiation and see if the US president doesn't lean in hard on the Europeans.
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The euro is going strong, the Dollar is comparatively weak...
Who would give in first? The US to benefit Microsoft alone at the expense of the rest of the country, or the EU to benefit the whole of the EU? If really pushed, i think the US would have to back down.
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Say: It was a real blow with a diplomatic Commissioner who did not mention the elephant in the room. The European political class is pissed by Microsoft's lobbying against open standards and interoperability, its software patents agitation, the OOXML debacle and its disobedient treatment of the Commission. Microsoft has public affairs problems in different parts of the Commission. Lobbying for Microsoft is generally perceived as working for Tobacco lobby groups.
a) Nelly indirectly endorsed the OFE Open Parliament petition [openparliament.eu] and the Hague Declaration [digistan.org].
b) Nelly spoke of proprietary vs. non-proprietary standards, a terminology not used by the Commission before.
c) Nelly recommended Munich and the Netherlands as best practice.
e) Ditmar Harhoff, an economist, called for patent reform. Europe would be well advised not to follow the US
g) Graham Tailor from Open Forum put emphasis on the Freedom to Leave.
From the speech of the Commissioner [europa.eu]:
This view is born from a hard headed understanding of how markets work â" it is not a call for revolution, but for an intelligent and achievable evolution.
But there is more to this than ensuring our commercial decisions are taken in full knowledge of their long term effects. There is a democratic issue as well.
When open alternatives are available, no citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company's technology to access government information.
No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one, through a government having made that choice first.
These democratic principles are important. And an argument is particularly compelling when it is supported both by democratic principles and by sound economics.
I know a smart business decision when I see one - choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.
The Netherlands and FOSS (Score:2)
c) Nelly recommended Munich and the Netherlands as best practice.
Speaking of which. Does anyone in here knows of **actuall** changes in the usage of software within the Dutch government due to those recommendations?
I know quite a few people working in ministries in Den Haag, and as far as I hear from them the ministries continue to be a 100% MS deployment.
Does *anyone* here has first hand experience with actual changes, or at least scheduled plans to introduce any changes?
Re:The Netherlands and FOSS (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ososs.nl/noiv/en [ososs.nl]
The Netherlands will create a governmental lobby platform.
It is all about the domino effect, Microsoft is very afraid of it. The critical mass to get a massive shift. Microsoft will combat it and further worsen its position.
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Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...
Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Guns/weapons do not make violence. Violence comes from people who act violent. Stopping the majority of this violence will require reviewing the source of the violent actions in people, regardless of preconceptions. Is it from the media? Is it from less religious influence? Is it from single parent households? Is it from the disparity of wealth?
And Hate speech, according to whom? Should we not allow vitriol that some people spout be public, for surely intelligent people would realize it for what it is? I mean, we in the USA have the KKK, who hates blacks and Catholics. Fair enough. We even allow them to demonstrate *peacefully*, even though everybody knows what they say is just wrong on all points. We view that they have a point, even if horridly invalid.
Determining "Hate Speech" is just like "Obscenity Laws". Ill know it when I see it.
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"Europe does a lot of stupid things,..."
What you said does not invalidate my statements, as Switzerland IS in Europe (the last I checked). They just havent entered in the EU.
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Front page news here is someone speeding at 130km/t, or accidents. Though I must admit the guns are rather convenient when you want to take suicide, which we Scandinavian people are apt to do.
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Yes, but they are also part of the army, which teaches army level discipline about the keeping and usage of weapons. And that is what I think that needs to be mandated to everyone who wants to own a gun : membership of a gun club, and training by professionals, be it from the police or the army.
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It is true that there is less gun violence than in US but from time to time, someone goes crazy and kill 10-20 people in a bloodbath with an automatic weapon. I think that the fact there is less violence and accidents goes
Close you eyes and the problem goes away (Score:2)
Guns/weapons do not make violence.
And speeding doesn't cause accidents. And so on, ad nauseam. Repeating this pseudo-fact does not make it more true. Yes, a gun lying in a drawer doesn't kill anybody, and a fast vehicle doesn't necessarily cause accidents. It depends on whether the driver is competent, of course - the problem being that an awful lot of driver are not nearly as good as they think, and that combination does accident. And of course, "it's not guns, but people that kill"; but apparently in the US there is an exceptionally high
"Strict gun-control" (Score:2)
Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...
Strict gun control is hitting the target when you shoot. As for gun violence, all Europe has to do is look in Europe, specifically Switzerland. All able bodied males are required to have a firearm yet crimes used with firearms are lower than in the US, where most "able bodied" males don't have firearms. It's not availability of firearms, it's more the culture; whereas Switzerland has a culture of peace, and money, the US has one of "the Wild
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That's because they have to take the gun home with them after leaving service, but the ammo has to stay in the barracks.
And nobody can buy, or make, their own ammo?
FalconRe: (Score:2)
As an American who had lived for a number of years in Europe, long enough to have gained a reliable sense of conditions on the ground (and Asia as well), I can tell you that America has no less "civilized" a culture than any other place in the world that I am familiar with.
I should have used a better phrase, depending on how you define civilized the US can be as civilized as any other nation. I used "Wild West" because that's an image many people in the world can understand. Myself, I grew up learning
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"Strict gun-control, stupid "hate speech" laws"
Only an american could list those as bad things.... *sigh*...
Declaring those to be problems with the EU is fairly idiotic, since those are by no means uniform in the EU. That said, it is easy to take issue with both of them.
The best studies of gun control indicate strict gun control laws tend to result in a very slight overall increase in murder and other violent crime (which is what is the normal justification for such laws). Anyone who does their research will see this issue has been well researched at this point in both cause and effect studies and correlations
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What about japan? They have extremely strict gun laws, as far as i remember, and very low rates of violent crime compared to other countries.
Yup. There are also countries with very high gun ownership rates like Norway, that have incredibly low rates of violent crime. That's why I said strict gun control laws tend to produce a very slight increase in violent crime. There are other factors that correlate very strongly with rates of violent crime, however, and where these are different you'll see drastically different rates regardless of gun control laws. The primary one is wealth disparity, which is why socialized healthcare funded with a tax on
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With billions of dollars at stake, it's a lot easier to shoot people.
With the corruption of police and judicial systems, society in general is more violent too.
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A lot of america's problems with guns relate to illegal drugs just as we had problems with illegal booze.
I prefer to phrase it in terms of "A lot of america's problems with violent crime relate to illegal drugs just as we had problems with illegal booze." Drug dealers stab and beat people as often as they shoot them. Your point, however, is very valid. The prohibition on drugs and criminalization of drug usage is another very strong correlation. Some studies indicate serious violent crime would drop as much as one third if we spent a quarter of the money we're putting into the "war on drugs" on public rehab
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And Japan is?
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... and how about studies indicating gun presence in a house lead to much more accidents?
Indeed they do, but that isn't an issue of crime, nor, necessarily a valid reason to make something illegal. Having a backyard pool is increases the risk of your child dying twenty times as much as owning a firearm. Buying your child a bicycle increases their chance of dying equally to having firearms in the house. No one would even consider outlawing either of those. Claiming firearms should be a special case is just playing on unrealistic fears.
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how many crimes have been avoided by the wide availability of guns vs. delta risk ?
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yes, but if you buy a firearm with the explicit goal of reducing your risk ... and by buying the gun you increase the risk, something smells fishy.
This is straying quite far from the topic. The original point was if is was an absurd belief only an American could hold to strict gun control laws were stupid. As for whether or not acquiring a firearm is statistically more or less likely to result in your death or that of a family member, well that depends a lot upon what categories you fall into. For example, according to one study 78% of all incidents where children accidentally shoot themselves are with firearms illegally obtained in the first place.
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SOURCE ?
Gary, Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 1995, Vol. 86 No. 1.)
It is one of the most well accepted studies of the sort, both because of the conservative stance he took in putting together the numbers, the meticulous methodology, and his own credentials as a person who had not vested interest of bias at the time. He is criminology professor, then at Florida State, with no affiliation with the NRA o
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Strict gun-control, stupid "hate speech" laws, raiding an entire ISP to find TPB and shutting all of the sites down, and censorship just to name a few.
Europe is not a single country, my friend. A lot of countries allow "hate speech" to an extend. Here in Denmark for instance, any kind of organisation, except if they publicly encourage to violence. Which makes perfect sense to me.
The strict gun-control is just something people want. So that is not stupid at all. Different laws for different people.
The ISP case was not a European event either, it was a national event. And censorship is a lot lessen in Europe than it in most of the world, including
hey, the minister took a swipe at evil weasels. (Score:5, Funny)
Some Choice Quotes (Score:3, Interesting)
Richard Stallman (Score:4, Insightful)
It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic.
I'm all for advocating freedom, open source, and open standards. I also believe that these causes are best fought by level-headed folk. Acting like a crack-pot only makes the whole cause look bad.
Search your feelings Skywalker, you know it to be true.
Fanatics... (Score:2, Insightful)
Many of us benefit from his contributions, and I am grateful for that, but RMS is also a crack-pot and his statements must be taken with a grain of salt. It is interesting how most people today point at political and religious fanactics and all agree that fanaticism is never good, while many here worship at the feet of a fanatic.
I have no trouble admitting stallman is a fanatic. But when he started writing free software, you had to be crazy to think you could have a whole free software ecosystem.. build tools, kernel, libraries...
Sometimes change doesn't happen without a fanatic getting it all started...
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Re:Richard Stallman (Score:5, Insightful)
I take issue with:
1. Equating Stallman's fanaticism for free software, with the popular view of religious fanaticism is nothing but trolling. He isn't violent and he doesn't threaten bombings or beheading.
2. Fanaticism in the sense that Stallman portrays it is a good thing.
3. Demonstrably some people disagree with 'fanaticism is never good'. The fanatics quite like the idea for a start. Non-violent fanatics are a good thing, if only to remind us where we could do better/go further toward a goal.
Alex.
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Fanaticism certainly doesn't win you brownie points when it comes to diplomacy. I thought we learned this lesson with Bush.
You insist that his
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I find sock-puppets to be weak sauce. I'm shocked the site allows them. I'm not sure how everyone is so convinced which accounts are puppets. I'm guessing the mods can see ip addresses and such.
That being said, I did pull a sock-puppet prank once myself, but only as a joke. I thought it was a pretty good joke, and I mad
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Simple Solution (Score:2)
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PS: I didn't mean this to be a "be all end all solution", I realise any system has flaws but slashdot is ridiculously open to this crap.
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And he probably got confused, he posted the same thing [slashdot.org] to a Firehose submission and didn't read the one that actually made it to the front page.
When you're in a desperate rush to stock up on karma and shill your own posts you tend to make those mistakes, I guess.
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Nice that they provide a doc [europa.eu] version (instead of a odf version). But at least pdf and html are open.
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Advertisements aren't squandering money either. It one way you generate public knowledge and interest in your product, which translates into sales. And I'm not sure that I'd put advertising in the same breath as corruption unless your advertisement strategy i
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Re:Profit? Crime has not paid. (Score:4, Insightful)
No technology lasts forever in its current state. Even the Linux now is different from the Linux 10 years ago. Good developers and admins keep learning and adapt. Bad ones don't. If you cannot work in the IT industry because the technology you learned is no longer used, then you destroyed your own career, not anyone else. You're responsible for making yourself marketable.
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Saying 'a good developer should be able to pick up a new language' is like saying 'a good sys admin should be able to pick up a ne
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My first job was doing C#.Net and SQL, with absolutely no experience in either of those. In a week I was fixing small defects. A week after that, larger defects. A week after that, new features. I was brought in to fix a PHP application with no PHP experience and did so within the time allotted. I was brought in to make a Java webservice hosted on Tomcat with only acade
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And my experience at most of my companies was that most of the work fixing defects or adding features
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Is that development? Sure in the same way that welding a panel to the space shuttle makes you a rocket scientist. But trying to act like you 'KNOW' they languages you just used when you just tinkered in them isn't the sa
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Ask the people who worked on DRDOS, Lotus, Word Perfect, OS/2, Netscape, BeOS and so on about careers and keeping up with the latest technologies.
Advertising annoys the people targeted and has done Microsoft less good than product would. I consider that a waste.
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If Linux wiped out Microsoft tomorrow and everyone dropped
Re:Profit? Crime has not paid. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no longer possible to write a commercial desktop or server OS and expect to turn a profit from it... BeOS was great, but it wasn't compatible with microsoft and ultimately doomed.
Open source is barely competing, despite the obvious price advantage.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed...
Novell faced a similar fate...
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable... The only way to compete is very slowly through open source, leveraging the lack of cost and advantages of distributed development. Even then, the process of winning market share over from microsoft is far too slow to make a business selling competing software.
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Funny, a few years ago Apple was left for dead, developed a new OS, and is gaining market share as they're selling it.
Similarly, you can't write a commercial office suite, just look at wordperfect, once the dominant player, now pretty screwed.
Corel still sells Wordperfect and makes a profit doing so, but their market share is pathetic. If Sun, IBM, Corel, etc. got together and worked on a kick-ass offic
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A sexy UI will sell software.
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An office suite is by nature and definition a rather boring set of tools.
Its job is to produce documents or display and manipulate data. Any sort
of aggrandizement in the form of a fancy graphical interface adds nothing
to its functionality and may even excessively distract or annoy the user.
Actually, that's not true. Beautiful things work better [jnd.org], according to one of the bigger experts in the field.
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competition (Score:2)
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft simply isn't viable...
I don't suppose Google or Sony has got the memo? Or Apple, for that matter?
Google had, and still has, a good search engine whereas MS didn't. I recall from years ago how people complained about how they couldn't tell the difference between search results and ads when using MSN, the few tymes I used it myself I didn't find any relevant results. Now, if you look at MS's Live.com [live.com] it has a clean interface, like Goog
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Similarly with Sony, Microsoft entered a market already dominated by Sony, and in which both Sony and Nintendo have a very strong presence...
Perhaps i should rephrase my statement to read:
It's come to the stage that commercial competition with microsoft in markets they dominate simply isn't viable.
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Apple are also not directly competing with microsoft, they sell a bundle of hardware and software together.
Plus, much of their market share increases recently have been due to the ability of their hardware to run windows as well as osx, making apple a risk-free choice for a premium system. They also already have a market leading position in another market (mp3 players).
Re:Profit? Crime has not paid. (Score:5, Interesting)
C will cannibalize any prior language on any platform (from stamps to supers). After that, Unix will not be long to follow, due to simple methods of controlling hardware/software.
Also, the MacOS is dead. Dead through and through. Unix and Windows are the only 2 choices. Just so happens that a company used the FreeBSD base and added a snazzy GUI.
Even since that, guess what is next to die? Microsoft. Why? OSS people need only make the 90% solution, because that "90% @ free" is better than "100% @ big_money" according to many many people. When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch. Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that.
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From my experience, it is a sad fact that people won't realise this - however much you try to suggest that there's no point paying £200 for an office suite when they only use the bi
OpenOffice (Score:2)
I use OpenOffice entirely, whereas the majority of everyone I know insist that they "need" MS Office. So I will try to say to them that for schoolwork/writing letters, OO.o has everything they need, but without the price tag. I will then go on to say that it can save the MSOffice formats, so there won't be any compatibility issues, and that there's barely any difference in the interface, so it's not like they've got to learn a new piece of software. yet somehow, they still end up spending £200 o
the MacOS is dead (Score:2)
If OSX is dead then why is it gaining market share [google.com]?
When people realize that one doent need a 200$ operating system to take care of most tasks, they will switch.
Does that explain why people are switching to Macs? Leopard costs $130, a family pack of for 5 Macs cost $200, while the 10 client license for OSX Server cost $500 and for unlimited clients it's $1000.
Acer, Dell, IBM, Asus, and the rest of the gang will make sure of that.
Yea, Micheal Dell has said he'd love to be able to sale Dells with OS
Re:the MacOS is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Read your Tanenbaum son.
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It's still gaining market share, therefore the OS is not dead.
Hopefully that is straight forward enough. OSX is a Unix varient, and very much alive.
You are still misunderstanding. (Score:2)
No one said OSX is dead. MacOS died at version 9, and OSX replaced it.
Those OSes before OSX are the Classical Mac OS [wikipedia.org].
Hopefully that is straight forward enough. OSX is a Unix varient, and very much alive.
While OSX is based on BSD it's still the MacOS, OSX [wikipedia.org] is the successor to Classical MacOS.
Falcon
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MacOS is not OS X. (Score:2)
Mac OS is what died with version 9. Some of its toolkits still live, but what we have today are Windows and UNIX, and Apple is in the business of selling UNIX.
We look at it differently then, I look at the OS that created for Macs by Apple run as MacOS and OSX runs Macs. Yes, it's compleatly different than MacOS 9 and earlier but it's still MacOS. It generally works well however it doesn't for MkLinux [wikipedia.org], though Apple worked on running Linux on Macs I don't consider MkLinux as MacOS.
Falcon
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No they haven't. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Lisp, Algol, Simula, and a bunch of other languages predate C, while GM-NAA I/O, OS 360, TOPS-10, etc. were around before UNIX.
"Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period."
See above. An old proverb about people living in glass houses not casting stones comes to mind here.
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I've seen your types here before. It's the "Real total ROI" game. There's plenty of places to see why you're wrong. You can do that research.
---A bigger issue that companies pay for is the support and the management of their software. Also the case of buying in large amounts especially for government allows for even cheaper cost per unit.
This is the common excuse MS and likes use to develop a cost for f
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The Amiga is a bad example because its demise was entirely due to late-period Commodore's legendary ineptitude. Bone-headed management decisions killed the Amiga, not MS.
Re:Profit? Crime has not paid. (Score:5, Interesting)
The penalties are just for non-compliance, the difficulties of the myriads of Microsoft lobby outfits to "understand" what the Commission wants. When Microsoft sued the Commission it won just another enemy. Microsoft acted like a bully, bought politicians, harassed the Commission. This made so many people fed up. Parliament members file parliament questions on Microsoft. Lobbying for Microsoft got a pretty bad smell if you care about your career in public affairs.
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