On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Steven Leeman <[email protected]> wrote: >> Even if it is important, if this is implemented this way, ignoring Mr. >> Novaretti's statement, I don't think it would ban open standards, but it >> just would not demand them. That would only seem fair, wouldn't it? I don't understand the first email since I don't understand enough Dutch. But I believe we are talking about requirement sets for EU ICT systems. In that context, if the world we live in was a perfect world, yes, allowing FOSS usage would be fair and fairness would be enough. Any EU body would choose software solutions based on rational choices such as long-term cost, democratic access for all citizen ,etc.
But we don't live in a such world. For reasons I wont speculate about, most of the times, official EU bodies decide to go with software from vendors playing the vendor lock-in game. The solutions from these vendors are made to ease integrate with others from the same vendor. While at the same time, they are made to make integration with other solution harder. Or worse, they are made to make integration with FOSS or from small-vendor solutions almost impossible. If nothing is done to reverse that tendency, the entire EU ICT ecosystem is plagued to use solutions from a small sets of large vendors. Leading the market to a de-facto monopoly or oligopoly in the EU ICT market. And since we need to communicate with the EU as citizen, we are also induced to use softwares from these vendors, and to pay for them. To solution advocated by many, is not the enforce FOSS usage but to promote the use of freely available and documented standardized data format for both archiving and exchange. The debate is about how the EU rules to decode what make such a format. Previously, a good work has been done in the first version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). But it appears that the draft for the second version is worse. Plagued with orwellian double-speaks that remove any meaning of the open and freely available data format requirement by redefining "open" and "available" outside their usual meaning. > Best is to follow this at http://www.ffii.org/ I guess? Also, for those into micro-blogging, you can also follow the !fsfe group on identi.ca (if you don't mind redundancy and the occasional flamewars): http://identi.ca/group/fsfe -- ubuntu-be mailing list / mailto:[email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-be
