Verily I say unto thee, that bbgruff spake thusly:
> Homer wrote:
>> Without quoting his private correspondence verbatim, in essence he
>> states his claim was unsubstantiated rumour that he'd heard on two
>> separate occasions. No surprise there, but like the source of this
>> gossip, I'm ever hopeful.
>
> Thanks for posting the result, Homer :-)
>
> It really was a bit of a wild claim, wasn't it?
Yes, but there is in fact some fire behind this smoke.
Here's the full reply I just sent Jeff:
######
Thanks for the clarification.
I think I can offer an explanation for this rumour:
[quote]
European Commission accused of open source 'bias'
Proprietary software groups have a whine.
By Paul Meller, IDG News Service | IDG News Service
Published: 11:06 GMT, 07 July 09
Industry groups have both criticised and praised what they consider a
bias in favour of open-source software in the European Commission's
plans to update the rules governing industry standard technologies.
The Commission set out a plan for a complete makeover of the rules last
week, a move it said was essential if European information and
communication technology (ICT) is to remain relevant and globally
competitive.
Currently, government bodies are limited in their choice of ICT
suppliers to ones that are registered with a short list of recognised
standards organisations, including ISO, the International Standards
Organisation, its European equivalents the ESOs and the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU).
The private sector has moved beyond this short list. Fora and consortia
such as the W3C, OASIS and ECMA are all standards organisations and are
widely recognised in the industry, but they cannot be referenced when a
firm bids for a public sector contract, or when an authority is setting
public policy.
The reforms proposed in the Commission's white paper "should improve the
possibilities to use and reference EU recognised standards in
legislation and public procurement," the Commission said in a statement.
...
According to the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), the
emphasis on open standards in the Commission's white paper amounts to a
bias in favour of open-source software.
In a statement, it said it is "concerned that the policy framework
suggested in the White Paper seems to favour open source software over
proprietary software to achieve more interoperability."
"Our key policy objective should be the removal of systemic bias, not
its introduction," said ACT President Jonathan Zuck.
[quote]
http://news.techworld.com/applications/118711/european-commission-accused-of-open-source-bias/
So in summary, the EU intends to promote the use of Open Standards, but
a Microsoft front organisation [1] (ACT) denounces this as a bias
against them.
Note: Microsoft expended considerable effort and money in an attempt to
convince us they were committed to Open Standards, as part of their push
for OOXML standardisation and adoption, and yet here we see one of their
representative bodies bemoaning the adoption of Open Standards. ACT also
seems to be suggesting that their members' technology is inherently
non-interoperable, which is also in contradiction to the claims [2] made
by it's founding member, Microsoft. This is made all the more ironic by
recent events, where Microsoft released 20,000 lines of GPL-licensed
code for the Linux kernel [3] (actually only 14,010 [4]), although this
was later revealed to be borne out of necessity to avoid a violation of
the GPL [5].
I hope this insight proves useful.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Competitive_Technology
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/
[3] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/20/microsoft_windows_drivers_linux/
[4] http://tinyurl.com/microsoft-cancer
[5] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23/microsoft_hyperv_gpl_violation/
######
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
23:39:02 up 77 days, 3:37, 4 users, load average: 0.01, 0.03, 0.00
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