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Eurosceptic Bloggers

Monday, February 21, 2005

Ban all Commercial Software

Well not exactly, but what organisation would create standards that:

Exclude such widely recognized standards as DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), 802.1X and even the cell phone technology GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications).
Thats right you guessed it, the EU.
It requires a standard to be "irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis" and impose no constraints on "re-use." Such restrictions don't allow standards that, for example, rely on patents for which a royalty may be charged, according to Müller.
I am all for open source, it has produced a lot of very useful things and lowered the cost of computing. But to imagine that we can do away with proprietary technology is naive. I'm convinced that the very existence of Microsoft drives the open source movement to produce much more. I don't know what the answer to the problem is, but every time someone tries to harmonise something, we seem to loose more than we gain. Thanks to Strange Stuff for the link.

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