Showing posts with label comptia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comptia. Show all posts

22 April 2010

For Openness – and Open Source - We Need Transparency

Transparency is a close cousin of openness, and it's becoming increasingly, er, clear that we need the former in order to obtain the latter. A new study [.pdf] confirms that the voluntary lobbying register, introduced by the European Commission in 2008 as a sop to those who were pressing for full transparency, is just a joke:

On Open Enterprise blog.

01 May 2008

Multiple Implementations vs. Multiple Standards

I've written many times about the distinction between multiple competing impementations of a standard, which promote competition because there are no switching costs, and multiple standards, which promote lock-in. But it seems that some people just don't get this simple idea:

The “South African Bureau of Standards” (SABS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) on Friday 18 April as an official national standard. This adoption, if implemented, will reduce choice, decrease the benefits of open competition and thwart innovation. The irony here is that South Africa is moving in a direction which stands in stark relief to the reality of the highly dynamic market, with some 40 different formats available today.

“Multiple co-existing standards as opposed to only one standard should be favoured in the interest of users. The markets are the most efficient in creating standards and it should stay within the exclusive hands of the market”, Hugo Lueders explains.

And which bunch of geniuses put this nonsense together? Why, our old friends CompTIA, which has by now given up any pretense of offering objective comment on the computer market, and is simply a vehicle for crude Microsoft propaganda. At least their desperation in the face of rising open standards like ODF are driving them out into the open for all to see. (Via Rob Weir.)

09 February 2007

Red in Tooth and Claw

More signs of desperation:

The European Commission has resisted efforts by Microsoft to make it abandon its report into open-source software, it was revealed this week. But the Commission was swayed into allowing a 10-day period for feedback before completing the report.

Harnessing the opportunity to provide feedback, Microsoft produced 25 pages of arguments as to why the report — which quantified the benefits of open source to European organisations — should be shelved. The software giant also commissioned a respected university academic to back its case and enlisted the help of a trade association, CompTIA. The academic produced 45 pages of evidence supporting Microsoft's case, while CompTIA wrote a 40-page submission.

Worth reading are both Rishab Ghosh's comments on the whole shenigans, and the letter to the European Commission from the Initiative for Software Choice. And yes, those tell-tale weasel-words "software choice" do indeed mean that this is an organisation partly funded by Microsoft to do down free software at every opportunity under the guise of "balance", "choice" and - supreme irony - "freedom".