AboutWelcome to Free Software Daily (FSD). FSD is a hub for news and articles by and for the free and open source community. FSD is a community driven site where members of the community submit and vote for the stories that they think are important and interesting to them. Click the "About" link to read more...
Last year, when I was socializing the idea of creating the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, I gave a presentation I called "ODF Interoperability: The Price of Success". The observation was that standards that fail never need to deal with interoperability.
On Friday FSFE sent a letter to the European Commission to support Open Standards and interoperability. In the drawn-out battle to retain at least a weak recommendation for Open Standards in the revised European Interoperability Framework, FSFE has countered a leaked letter by the lobby group Business Software Alliance with its own thorough analysis of the relation between standards and patents.
A recent News.com article by Martin LaMonica reports on the ODF vs OOXML war. The report mentions the arguments over one standard vs two competing standards. But shouldn't we be trying to solve - not prolong - the interoperability gap?
Everybody's talking about Microsoft - the hot topics are interoperability, exclusion, standards, and the doubts of a Red Had and the European Union about their alleged about-turn.
The final version of the important Digital Agenda for Europe has been leaked – and shows that the European Commission has betrayed open standards. Where an earlier draft had an entire section headed “Open Standards and Interoperability”, the latest version only uses the word “open” once in the corresponding section “Interoperability and standards.”
The European Interoperability Framework is just one battle among many. Besides the topic of interoperability in the public sector, there’s the task of reforming standardisation systems so that they produce Open Standards, and educating policy makers about the importance of the issue.
The EU Commission and Microsoft have settled the browser choice issue, and the Commission will continue to monitor interoperability issues, with Microsoft posting a new and "improved" set of documents today about interoperability.
Nobody is buying it. Well. Employees, maybe. Microsoft is once again promising interoperability and adherence to standards, but its own version of each. Interoperability that is safe only for noncommercial software excludes Microsoft's number one competitor, Linux. It is noncommercial and commercial, depending on who is using it. So, right there it tells you that this is a promise to do nothing that matters.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is pressuring the European Commission to remove the last vestiges of support for Open Standards from the latest version of the EU's interoperability recommendations, the European Interoperability Framework. FSFE has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Commission by the BSA last week.