[ILUG] email sent to politicians about Mary Hannafin'sdecisionnotto use open source

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Mon, 3 May 2004, Rick Moen wrote:

> (A proper reply to Mary Hannafin's statement might politely call its
> bluff on open standards, too:  Microsoft Corp. has never met an
> open standard it can stand!  Discuss a few, and point out that the
> best way to adhere to them is through open source implementations.)

Hmmm.. TCP/IP?  HTTP? Notable survivors, despite explicit attempts at
"improving" them by MSFT.  They're useful examples because they
*weren't* subverted, keeping the discussion safely away from being
we-coulda-bin-contenders-no-honestly.

Compare what has flourished on the Net as a whole, and on the web
particularly, despite (and we argue because) no corporation controls
them.

I think the point about control bears hammering on about - that a
society needs to control things that are fundamental to it, irrespective
of what any corporation might wish to impose.

If these things are under corporate control, the corporation gets to lead
the society by the nose, and this is going to be for the benefit of the
corporation's shareholders rather than the society.

The WWW and the Internet itself are clearly in the way-too-important
bracket.  I would argue that word-processing and spreadsheet document
formats fall into it also.

For a government minister to say (at a Microsoft sponsored
conference) "we're sticking to a Microsoft-controlled software stack"
is... questionable.

(I'm not sure who the intended audience of the above is, it started as a
reply and turned into a rant.  I mean, how often does that happen?)

Ronan