Shared Office Code Unlikely to Sway Governments
202887
Microsoft Corp.&#39;s offer to share the source code of Office 2003 with governments may be a positive move, but governments say it is unlikely to make much difference to which software they choose.
273463
Unless the European court that upheld European sanctions against Microsoft demands different remedies than US courts did, it won&#39;t do much to level the playing field for open-source products, one open-source advocate says.
285133
Windows? Linux? Mac OS? One day it won't matter.
450092
Perhaps this morning's FTC blessing of Google's intended merger with DoubleClick was no surprise, but a read of the final decision reveals an astonishing reason: The Commission claims it wouldn't really have the authority to stop it.
224726
OECD countries to cooperate on data protection The world's most developed economies will co-operate to uphold privacy laws in the face of increasing amounts of cross-border data transfer. The member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have agreed the plan.â¦
171157
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;
377131
Almost everything that can be said has been said about the latest moves by Microsoft to create Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about Linux. Countless pundits and analysts have pointed out that Microsoft threats are toothless. Some have noted that Microsoft has singled out Linux and OpenOffice, the biggest threats to its monopoly on operating systems and office suites. Surely Microsoft could claim that the *BSDs infringe on similar patents if not the same ones. But the *BSDs do not pose as great a threat to the company. Others have pointed out that Microsoft would be insane to pull an SCO and sue its own customers. Still others have noted that IBM and/or OIN could respond to a patent war with a massive retaliation in patent infringement claims. I have no doubt that Microsoft has lifted a lot of GPL code (more likely algorithms) for Windows, which would prevent Microsoft from following through with its threats. To do so would require that Microsoft open its own code to scrutiny. The list goes on, and others have covered the angles very well. There is one perspective I haven't yet seen, at least not the way I propose to deal with it. This perspective follows below.
713132
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¦
337538
How far is too far when it comes to the freedom of software? Plus: Palm slipping, Windows sliding.
450620
Microsoft's purpose for suggesting its Office Open XML suite of formats become adopted as an international standard is not so it can leverage its seal of approval in sales. Its purpose is to enable the company to be perceived worldwide as cooperating with businesses and with nations in the drive for interoperability, especially for the benefit of the European Commission which maintains that Microsoft is an unfair competitor.
431571
Can computers get along fine without writers? Word is they just might. [Missing Link]
268623
Microsoft Corp., a worldwide leader in operating systems, announced its decision to share Office 2003 source code with governments from over 30 countries.
168018
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.
506123
Looks to attract companies that can't afford to equip every remote user or branch office but still want some security.
45682
For a number of years, Microsoft has allowed government entities in most of the world access to the source code for Windows; as of today, Microsoft is expanding this so-called Shared Source Initiative to include Office.
205121
No one is forcing anyone to put their work into the public commons. But, once you do, you need to accept that you no longer can wholly control how it is used. The open-source software world understands this to its benefit.
520541
Exploit code targets a flaw that generated a government warning last week.