Open source ‘too costly’ for Irish e-gov
I’m worried about what “Mary Hanafin said in this article”:http://www.enn.ie/frontpage/news-9410098.html about using “open standards” rather than open source. Now, I don’t have any problem at all with their using proprietary software. But they do have to be open standards in more than one way, and I’m not sure that this has been picked up by her. There’s open as in having the specification of the standard available, and having the software written to the standard rather than “extending and embracing”. But there’s also the spectre of software patents hanging over this as well. All of the standards in use *must* be free of software patents to really be considered an open standard. I have a bad feeling about some of this…