Guest post by “One member of the European Parliament and a handful of their advisors and assistants started a free software group last Saturday, aiming to increase the use of Free and open source software in the European Parliament’s IT infrastructure. The user group is open to all who work in the European Parliament, including staff and assistants working in political groups.”
Is this the same EU that changed it’s European Interoperability Framework from talking about “open source” to “open specification” .. to please Microsoft?
Open specification is more important than open source since an open specification enables a level playing field of BOTH closed and open software.
except when closed source doesn’t do what you want, expected or is against your interests doing things behind your back.
Then it isn’t fulfilling the specification is it?
As long as “open” doesn’t include “RAND”. There is a huge push on right now from certain vested interests to try to change the meaning of “open” so that it no longer includes the right for anyone to implement a specification.
Anyone at all should be able to implement a specification free of royalty charges or threats of lawsuit … that is what is meant by “open specification”.
Yes, obviously RAND wouldn’t be suitable since I want a level playing field.
Clearly and completely defined of API’s and data formats that are freely accessible leave plenty of room for innovation (and black boxes, for those who like those kind of things).
(emphasis mine)
No, that’s what YOU mean by “open specification”. Others might just mean something like “a published specification that I may obtain (either by buying or downloading for free) and implement” (versus “a specification only known inside [microsoft|apple|google|etc] that I have to reverse-engineer to be compatible with”) without any implied additions like the “royalty-free” that you seem to be implying.
You would be correct when it comes to businesses. If the EU pays for the development of a standard they should demand a totally free standard.
When _people_ hear open standard they think _totally free without strings_.
Are you #&^@#*&^ serious? ActiveSync then is and open protocol by your definition.
Edited 2011-02-08 09:25 UTC
Yep. That is why it’s being used in gov’t institutions and that is why I believe I am being ripped off by Microsoft and have 0 shame in saying that I don’t pay for their software a single penny. Every single other piece of software I own is legally obtained through.
Well, both the EU and Microsoft consider “royalty-free” to be a prerequisite for a standard to be called “open”. So, it’s not just him.
Also, the software that manages the information of the European governments should be audited, be able to be customized, recompiled, modified, etc… if the European Union wants to know what happens with the information of their governments and wants to be able to access to it even if the software company says:
– “Pay that $$$$ if you want the next version you need”
or
– “Sorry, our company is closed”
or
– “You won’t access your information without my programs, do you think I’m here for your interests?”.
When it comes to businesses they should be free to choose. But organizations that work for the people like government should be held to a higher standard. I think they should demand an open standard and strive for an open source solution whenever possible.
And here I was already happy Neelie Kroes staff is able to use Firefox:
http://twitter.com/#!/NeelieKroesEU/status/27055648579518464
So some are able to use atleast some FOSS.
Did they need it to be “approved” before using that kind of software? I use Opera in an environment where any software that hasn’t been vetted via the internal process is basically outlaw. Portable apps came to the rescue and now I’m using Opera, FreeCommander, taekwindow and others.
My guess is they have general IT staff for all EU-staff and those have now approved the use of Firefox next to IE.
I’m sure they have some kind of internal security and update policy and maybe some internal or otherwise webbased applications they need to support.
Having a limited set of applications that are all tested, centrally maintained and supported sounds like a very normal and preferred way of handling application management.
Having the option to allow portable apps (for power users only!) is a nice bonus but also a security risk. I’ll assume that you know what you are doing, won’t need support, will keep the portable app up-2-date yourself and won’t use dangerous tools (basically meaning you are part of the IT-staff for your own equipment from now on)
True. Except that it’s not reactive at all: we are still stuck with Eclipse 3.3 (2007!) and it’s only two months ago that the project I was working on then migrated to JDK 1.5 released in… 2004. It’s really laughable (to me) that the IT department of a car manufacturer gets to vet software from IBM or Sun or even Apache… my jaw dropped when I discovered they wrote an ugly and impractical framework on top of Apache Maven!
Very true.