“Michel van der Bel, director of Microsoft in the Netherlands,
is unhappy with the recently published proposal by the Dutch
political party, Groenlinks, requiring all Dutch government
institutions to use only ‘open’ computer software from 2006…“Microsoft Nederland finds the Groenlinks plan oversimplified
and one-sided. According to Van der Bel, while Microsoft is wholly
in favour of open standards (such as XML, SOAP and UDDI), it
disagrees with the open-source model and insists on protecting its
intellectual-property rights…”
[Editor’s Note: For more information on the Groenlinks
proposal, please see this story in the Dutch publication de
Volkskrant, provided by reader Paul A. Rombouts. The story is
in Dutch, and Mr. Rombouts has provided a rough translation,
excerpted below. -BKP]
de Volkskrant: GroenLinks wil af van dure software
(Green-Left Party Wants to Get Rid of Expensive Software)
“The government should no longer be dependent on expensive,
closed computer systems. The Green-Left party wants to make it
mandatory for the public sector to only do business with suppliers
of software that allows customers to adapt and improve such
software by the year 2006.“With an argument for software that complies to open standards,
the Green-Left party is focusing on an ‘addiction to Windows’ from
which the government, education, and health-care sectors suffer.
‘The public sector leans too heavily on the products of a few
suppliers,’ stated member of parliament Kees Vendrik.“This applies both to vendors of mass-products such as
Microsoft, and to suppliers of specialized software for the medical
sector. ‘They only sell you the right to use the software. Making
improvements is not allowed or is impossible because producers are
keeping secret how their programs are constructed…'”