Thursday, June 12, 2008

Open source as industrial policy

Industrial policy is a long-held conservative shibboleth. It’s a code word, government choosing winners and losers, government bad, government replacing the market, socialism, communism.

How far you go down that slippery slope shows how devoted you are to the ideology.

It has become clear to me over the last few years, however, that many countries see open source as an important industrial policy. Ideology be darned.

This is clearer today, with EC Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes (above) stating plainly that open standards, and open source, are preferable to anything proprietary, especially Microsoft’s OOXML.

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