Friday 1 December 2006

Interoperability - A vast subject

Inter-operability is not a new subject. Crimosoft seems to discover this word because they were until now in such a dominant position that their products were based on a "de-facto" standard - their own standard. As long as IE was the only one browser, no need to follow the W3C recommendations. Same for the Oasis standard for XML documents. This time is over, Billy boy.

Wikipedia on "de-facto" standards : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-facto_standard

Your GSM phone and my GSM phone will work say - in India or in Hong Kong. Why ? Because the French and the German telecom authorities started the GSM standard, which became a worldwide ETSI standard. Was there a need for patent coverage ?

Mmmm ... It happens that a US mobile phone company which name starts by a "M" was bribing a northern Europe operator to fax them all the internal discussions and was patenting everything underground. The funny story is that the guy faxing documents during the night had no sleep and fell on the ground during a meeting. I will never buy a GSM phone from "M".

It looks like a US tradition to try to f*** everybody with silly patents. The ETSI had to create a truce between the big players, but the Japanese players had to pay ...

But, anyway, my point is that companies can sit around the table and more or less agree on standards to garantee inter-operability, and this through standardisation bodies. Royalties agreements can exist, but the rules should be the same for eveybody. This is the normal way.

Doing bi-lateral agreements such as the MS-Novell deal is hijacking and unfair. MS playing unfair games ? No ? I cannot believe that ;-).

Here is an interesting comment on Red Hat reaction to the MS-Novel deal.
And here is a very nice article on Crimosoft dragging their feet to comply with the European requests on interoperability.

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