[A2k] Heise: Offene Standards, .NET/OOXML und das Internet Meldung vorlesen

[Matthias Spielkamp]

Thiru Balasubramaniam wrote:
>
> I would be grateful to German speaking readers on this list to help to
> those of us who are not German speakers with an English translation of
> this article?
>
> Thanks
>
> Thiru

Thomas Vinje, attorney with Clifford Chance and delegate of the European
Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) warned at the UN's Internet
Governance Forum (IGF) in Rio de Janeiro of an increasing dependence on
  Microsoft=92s .NET applications and asked governments to support a new
antitrust investigation against Microsoft.

"The Brazilian government could do a number of things", Vinje said. It
could tell the EU antitrust watchdogs that it is supporting a lawsuit.
It could also, like Korea, open an own antitrust case against the
software giant. "Antitrust investigators love to have company", Vintje
said at a press conference at the IGF.

The so-called "Dynamic Coalition for Open Standards" has pledged to
inform about open standards and their advantages. Dynamic coalitions are
made up of all three-stakeholder groups: governments, private businesses
and civil society. Members of the "Open Standards" coalition are
organisations like the FSFE and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI),
and companies like Sun.

"Technical standards are invisible, like an invisible regulation, a
shadow regime", said Susan Struble, co-organiser for the coalition for
Sun Microsystems. Many governments are not aware that there aren't just
one or two large standardisation organisations but hundreds of industry
consortia.

A participant from South Africa had reported that Microsoft's proceeding
at the ISO is virtually unknown in his country (unfortunately, the
original does not mention what proceeding this refers to; presumably
it's the open document standardisation).

Struble said that the main purpose of the coalition is to inform. The
attention it received in Rio has been satisfactory. In one of the
workshop there had been an extensive debate with Microsoft's team. At
the WSIS, open standards proponents had had a hard time to make their
voices heard at all.

KEI's Thiru Balasubramaniam pointed to a couple other improvements.
WIPO's adoption of the development agenda put open standards on the
agenda. Additionally, a push for patent harmonisation at WIPO failed and
the patent and standards committees is now expected to calculate the
cost of the patent system with regard to possible negative effects for
developing countries.

Best regards,
Matthias