Just so, and certainly to be avoided! Clearly the preferred alternative is to have every government agency worldwide develop its own operating systems, etc. and then give them all away for free. It is the very definition of insanity to allow private corporations the power to create useful products at their own expense, and then compete freely with other corporations' products until there is a clear industry leader, and then have government agencies simply buy that product off of the shelf and use it to perform vital government functions. What were we thinking when we adopted this crazy model to begin with? Thank you, Norway!
ok im a bit slow but how do you get the above from
A government using .doc, or .pdf is a defacto endorsement of that product and forces whoever wants to read the doing of their government to use a particular private corporations product.
I dont care if they all run windows, what I care about is that I don't have to run X corps' word processor, y corps' on-line document viewer, Z corps' browser, and A corps' operating system. Clearly the solution is not a bunch of operating systems, but a handful of open document formats.
It is the very definition of insanity to allow private corporations the power to create useful products at their own expense, and then compete freely with other corporations' products until there is a clear industry leader, and then have government agencies simply buy that product off of the shelf and use it to perform vital government functions.
No one is saying that a corporation does not have the right to make whatever format with whatever license they want, to think that is whats going on (at least in my post) is insanity. It would be as stupid as me narrowing your position to mean that the government should not have to share any of its documents with the people of that nation. I think the Constitution and any copies of it should be kept under a locked key that only people with a certain amount of money to buy a copy of the key.