Hands Across the Water: Open Source and Open Standards
|
|
Item: "Having the latest computer technology is great. But what e-government users from the public sector as well as citizens really want is software interoperability. Unfortunately IT managers still only pay lip service to such interoperability, concludes a European project assessing today's open-source movement."
|
|
So reads the lead paragraph to an article called Brainstorming ways to push open source at a European Website, reporting on the conclusions of a project called FLOSSPOLS, launched to support Free/Libre/Open Source Software policy support in Europe. The summary continues on as follows:
"Open standards provide independence, not traditional vendor lock-in. They are good for users, purchasers and government from both the economic and competition standpoint," says Rishab Ghosh, from the Merit/Infonomics research institute in The Netherlands.
Given how often the words "open source" and "open standards" are bandied about in the technical press, it surprises me how little many in the open source community seem to care about the second half of this pairing or related tools. It's especially surprising since open standards don't need open source, but open source, like all other software does need open standards. And that's reason enough for the open source community to want to know more about them.
Why the low level of interest? I expect that there are a lot of reasons, but here are a few possibilities:
Full Story |
This topic does not have any threads posted yet!
You cannot post until you login.
