[Ubuntu-be] [OT] (NL): EC wil af van open standaarden

[Pierre Buyle]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Steven Leeman <steven at leeman.be> 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