Gambling With Open: A “How Bill Gates Made Money” Moment

On: April 2, 2010
About John Haltiwanger
An underliner. An intensifier. A meanderer. A walker in betweens. The gross product of the souls of forebears sliced into ribbons and blown into a clay him. A poetic impulse. An open source advocate. A master of ceremonies. A writer of codes. An interface fiend philandering among operating sytems. Creative nonfiction research artist. Textual mystic. Frequently explicit Function 'popular education' enumerated 03.03-12.6 TESC (Evergreen) WA NW US. Political economics, systems administration, cultural studies, writing, ethnomusicology, computer programming, web design, etc. All part of a balanced liberal arts degree. Socialist high school founded by feminists with a farm (Putney) 01-02 VT NE US. Deserter of West Chester PA. 16 year old proto Perl monger. 26 year old Ruby excavator. New new media student, old new media sponge. Mondo minded year 2000 Millenial Generation American. Of a rare form. Eagerly chewing electronic book reviews, ctheories, and autonomedias independent of any formal Media scholastics. Before the field had a name in my mind. Chasing a thing called 'software studies' through the tubes, across the Atlantic, and into a Nederlands classroom. Playfully aware that this bio, like the medium it exists in, like the life it describes, remains malleable. Yet static in its own right.

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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.

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