Shared Office Code Unlikely to Sway Governments
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Ziff Davis - Government officials say Microsoft's move to share the source code for Office 2003 won't change anyone's mind about Microsoft or open source.
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Democrats want to require federal agencies to develop plans for managing peer-to-peer filesharing "risks," but federal CIO says "technology-neutral" approach is preferable.
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There is a fascinating article on Groklaw called Searching for Openness in Microsoft's OOXML and Finding Contradictions. One of the most relevant comments in the article is "So, they plan to be the only one in the Linux world that can actually interoperate with Microsoft. How do you think they will achieve that? By sharing? On the contrary, they already market themselves as uniquely interoperable, which means they get to interoperate and you don't, unless you are their paying customer."  There is also the Novell comment, "Only Novell has Microsoftâs endorsement as its partner to drive Linux-Windows interoperability."
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Democrats who will take over leadership positions in Congress next month doubt that the Department of Homeland Security can achieve nationwide communications interoperability by the end of 2008. One analyst said it might take 20 years.
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If Linus and the other key kernel developers were to back a shift to GPLv3, and if there were reasonable legal air cover from respected Open Source authorities for doing so, it seems unlikely that we'd see a substantive challenge to such a move.
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It's no surprise that Symantec and Adobe are wary of Microsoft bundling its own security software and electronic document format in Windows Vista, but the companies had yet to lodge official complaints about the operating system until now.
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Unpatched vulnerabilities may leave computers open to remote attacks.
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Government officials have sought greater access to the program's technical details to ensure the software is compatible with other applications and is hiding no obvious security flaws. -TheWashington Post
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Proposed law could prevent the government from offering broadband access.
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Yeah, but no, but yeah.. The UK government has made a statement offering cautious and qualified support for the adoption of open standards for government documents, but warns that there is no such thing as a document storage panacea.â¦
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Congress weighs a bill to restrict cooperation between U.S. companies and digital dictatorships.
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A Microsoft  document format  that may be adopted as an international standard this weekend  is a ploy to lock in customers, who could lose control over  their own data in a worst-case scenario, critics say.
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This scenario is all too familiar to office workers who collaborate electronically on projects: E-mails get passed around with differing versions of documents-in-progress attached. Instant messages whizz by. Web sites are cited, then lost. It's often a jumbled mess, with no central online location for shared data. There must be a better way.
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I can't urge you strongly enough to read the article entitled How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In. It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.   Think of this, if you will, as the Tivoization of Office files, only with malicious intent.  Microsoft could, indeed, open up the document format completely and swear before God that it will never sue anyone for patent infringement.  However, this does not prevent Microsoft from locking Office files in such a way that only Vista users can read them.  No one else will be able to do so without the proper authorization, thus rendering the open format and Microsoft compatibility entirely meaningless.
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Throughout the European Union, governments are grappling with how to guard against terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, Indian IT services companies have beefed up efforts to protect data.
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Neither my constituents nor myself were bribed. A lot of the proposals in the White Paper are just that, proposals on which no votes involving constituency voters will be called.
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In Berlin on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a product package aimed at local and regional e-government initiatives, in the midst of growing government opposition in Europe to proprietary software.Microsoft&#39;s Citizen Service Platform includes applications and templates designed for local and regional governments primarily in Europe and the United States. It is built on products, including SharePoint, Office Live, and Windows Server.While Microsoft has been selling software to the public sector for years, it has recently begun focusing on local governments after discovering that many people interact with their local governments more often than the federal government, said Ralph Young, vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Worldwide Public Sector group.Europe alone has more than 80,000 local and regional governments, Young said.Governments can use the Citizen Service Platform to create portals, manage documents, deploy alert systems in the case of emergencies, and create and manage citizen information databases that can be shared among different agencies.Microsoft is introducing the product as it faces&#160;mounting opposition Europe. Some governments there are migrating to open source products as a way to avoid being locked into a single vendor of proprietary software.Others, such as the Netherlands, are taking a more extreme route. Late last year, the Dutch parliament mandated that government organizations choose open source over proprietary software if a viable product is available. Agencies must also use open standards. The national government must comply with the new rules by May, with local governments following by the end of this year.Young was unfazed by the mandate. &quot;We have many opportunities in the Netherlands to work with local and regional governments,&quot; he said. &quot;We don&#39;t see any federal mandates having real impact locally because of local jurisdictions&#39; ability to make decisions in their best interest in terms of how to better serve citizens.&quot;Microsoft could be counting on local governments having autonomy from such federal mandates, said Mark Anderson, a consultant and founder of the Strategic News Service. &quot;There are a lot of times when a government will posture, and it doesn&#39;t really intend that posture to be carried through the rest of the country,&quot; he said.Still, some European government agencies may be predisposed to choose software other than Microsoft&#39;s, more so since the software giant began pushing its Open XML document format there, Anderson said. Microsoft is in the process of&#160;attempting to have Open XML be accepted as a standard&#160;by the International Organization for Standardization. Open XML competes with the Open Document Format promoted by IBM. Critics of Open XML accused Microsoft of stacking votes in the standardization process, souring some in Europe on Microsoft even further.Microsoft thinks that cost will determine decisions for many local governments. &quot;It&#39;s much less a religious discussion about open source and commercial software as it is about what are the solutions available that governments can see value from,&quot; said Young. &quot;Local governments are empowered to make decisions and if they say &#39;This is the best value for the dollar I spend over the life of a service capability, that will govern my decision-making process.&#39;&quot;