Gambling With Open: A “How Bill Gates Made Money” Moment
Bill Gates is to new media as Rupert Murdoch is to old media–an atavistic force of economics, mad gambling, and vector misdirection.
Beyond my undying desire to share TNT’s Pirates of Silicon Valley with everyone I know, I am sharing this video to put eyes onto Bill Gates’ sharkiness. The man is a ruthless, underhanded animal when it comes to profit and market control. So when I read that key elements of policy regarding a European Union commitment to open source and open standards is at stake in the EU’s Digital Agenda, I already knew who was behind it before reading this tweet from David Hammerstein, ex-Member of European Parliament for the Greens:
‘SOS to everyone as sources confirm that Kroes is about to eliminate “open standards” policy from EU digital agenda; Kroes has been under intense lobbying pressure from Microsoft to get rid of interoperability and open source goals of EU.’
Further confirmation of my suspicions appears in a ComputerWorld article on the issue:
According to people with good contacts to the politicians and bureaucrats drawing up the Agenda, Microsoft is lobbying hard to ensure that open standards and open source are excluded from that policy – and is on the brink of succeeding in that aim.
Without a EU citizenship, there is little I can do besides call attention to the fact that Microsoft is trying to hardball another government into maintaining the M$ business model and, by extension, their position as owners of the most common formats. Please, if you care about this and have an EU citizenship, fill in your comments in the online survey, online until 6 April.