Floschi’s Blog

Yesterday I had the chance to participate at this EU conferene in Berlin. At the beginning there were really nice keynote by Dr. Schäuble, the german Minister of the Interior and Viviane Reding, the Eu commissioner on information society and media. Then comes the keynote of the industry, spoken by Hermann-Josef Lamberti, a memeber of the Deutsche Bank management. He postulated things to be done by public administrations to get a efficient and accepted eGovernment. Here is one very interesting poitn he meintioned:

“Use mainstream! In germany, there are companies like Microsoft [...]. So don’t use Open Source adventures, only use the mainstream”

Wow. Will he pay higher taxes, if we restore the monopoly structures in its former condition? Maybe he won’t because he doesn’t pay his taxes in germany?

Later on we discussed the needs for open document exchange formats in a short panel together with Dr. Sturm by the german ministry of the interior, Patrick Durusau from the ISO commitee and Andrea di Maio, vice president of Gardner Research. His opinion was not to look at the battle of standardizing formats, but to look at the price/performance ratio of software implementing these standards. Hm, very interesting. I thinkif the price is 0, the ratio wil also be 0.

After all, the whole event impressed me more than I thought before. There were people willing to discuss the pros and cons of one or more standard formats. But I don’t think that there is a real chance for free software, because I also saw the extensive lobbying activities of Microsoft during the whole conference. They know how the influence decision makers.

Today I attended this workshop organized by the german EU presidency and the IDABC in Berlin. We discussed the needs for document exchange formats within the public administration. After some introducing talks and practical examples the participants developed their position in four parallel sessions. I attended the session regarding “the new ODEF standards - expectacions towards industry players”. In our opinion there should be no competition in standards, but competition in implementing one standard (e.g. ODF is the standard and many products implement this standard). There mustn’t be any doubts about patents and IP concerns in the standard and no sub- or supersets of this standard (no vendor specific proprietary addons).
On thursday, this statement will be part of the European eGovernment Conference lead by the german Minister of the Interior.

The discussion showed me that there is much uncertainty about the current situation, having one ISO standard (ODF) and getting a second one (OOXML) in the next future. In a statement Jean Paoli from Microsoft company stated, that there are the very different standards, one for OpenOffice.org and one for Microsoft Office. WOW! That’s nearly the same situation as now, I can’t see any improvements.

Maybe there should me more political pressure to get really interoperable products from Microsoft?