[GRLUG] Itunes and France

[Bob Kline]

I think France has this basically right in principle.
Knowingly or not,  it is fighting for standards,  and
we mostly know how important those are,  and
what the PC world was like just 15 years,  when
almost everything was proprietary,  and expensive.

M$  (Microsoft) has made it very clear what a
monopoly is all about,  and but for US gov't
intervention,  would now have leveraged it's monopoly
( which I believe is still largely intact ) to hog tie
the entire US computer industry.  It's push-pull.
Once you get big enough,  economies of scale make
people and companies actually root for you to take
it all.  Companies see it as too expensive to support
more than one version of anything,  and of course
companies have spent untold $billions training people
in the M$ way.  So the noose just keeps getting
tighter.  And people stay with what they know,  good
or bad.

The only way to beat all this is with standards.  You
either have standards or you get monopolies.  I think
this is what France,  and in some case other parts of
EU,  are attempting to do - free themselves of the M$
grip,  and if that is what they basically have in mind
I do applaud that.  The standards here would involve
standard interfaces,  so that others could make and
sell products that work with the M$  "OSes"  even
though they don't necessarily know what's inside.

    -Bob


On 7/1/06, David Pembrook <david at pembrook.net> wrote:
> Has anyone been following and bothered by this whole mess of France
> trying to force apple to give away its technology to competitors?
>
> http://www.playfuls.com/news_03269_France_vs_Apple_iTunes_should_become_open_source.html
>
> Personally, I think they should just pull out of France. Who's going to
> do business there if they can't control their own intellectual property.
>
> I'm not a fan of how Microsoft does business, but do we need to sue to
> get the inner workings of the SMB protocol for samba to work better?
>
> I'm done ranting lol..
>
> Dave
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