Norway: Open standards in the government
Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer declared: “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government.” The minister also requires that all government institutions “by the end of 2005 have worked out a recommendation for the use of open source code in the public sector”.
P.S. Restaurant Lehtoranta threatens to sue for a critique published on the net. The demand is just silly. Luckily the person being sued is a lawyer and an activist of Electronic Frontier Finland.
Linux Asia 2005
Frederick Noronha asked me to give a report on Linux Asia 2005.
After Asia Source, Linux Asia was a boring event. The difference between community events and corporate-driven conferences is that the latter have lots of PR talk and you need to work to find out what is the reality. But I also wanted to see the corporate side of FLOSS. Some random notes below.
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Long-term Approach to Software
In his essay Software That Lasts 200 Years, Dan Bricklin calls for an approach to software that takes into account long-term consequences. Bricklin compares software production to building projects - houses, bridges, roads - that are planned and built to last for a very long time. By contrast, “software has historically been built assuming that it will be replaced in the near future (remember the Y2K problem)”.
