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09.12.05
World Bank Prodded On Open Standards
 By
David Utter
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society thinks economic growth won't happen with proprietary products.
For growing economies to expand, a consensus of government officials and Berkman Center members think open standards will get them there, according to IHT.com. The 33-page "road map" developed by the group told the World Bank to consider the benefits of technology not controlled by a single company.
Open standards and open source differ. Open source refers to an application where the source code is freely available; most software companies that operate for profit lock their software into binaries and forbid the viewing of the underlying code.
Open standards refer to a common way of handling a task. TCP/IP lets protocols like http and ftp traverse the Internet from one place to another. For developing economies, locking in to a technology controlled by a single vendor could be a costly and restricting decision.
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Massachusetts has been in the news recently as two years of negotiations with Microsoft have led the state to declare its government agencies will be required to create and save documents in PDF or Open Document format. Microsoft does not support Open Document, and is at risk of losing not only the state's business if it switches away from Office, but potentially the business of thousands of vendors who work with the state.
IBM and Oracle helped the Berkman Center sponsor a three-day summit of leaders from nations like China and India in February; both sponsors have been open source supporters and Microsoft rivals. Microsoft is a long-time sponsor of Harvard's Berkman Center.
Yahoo's Yang Defends China Actions
By
David Utter
The company is under an obligation to obey the law wherever it operates, and had to comply with Chinese authorities.
Reporters Without Borders claimed in a news release that Yahoo Holdings of Hong Kong provided Chinese investigators with the IP address used by journalist Shi Tao. The authorities connected that address with an email sent by Mr. Shi to a New York-based web site.
That email contained what prosecutors characterized as a "state secret." It discussed how the government planned to deal with possible activities and the media, related to the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, appearing at a summit in Hangzhou, could not discuss the case, which has seen Mr. Shi sentenced to ten years in prison. Mr. Yang said the company receives legal requests for information all the time, USA Today reports.
Search Engine Journal noted how former US president Bill Clinton, appearing at the same summit, said: "In China, I think, that so far the political system and restraint on political speech in the Internet has not seemed to have any adverse commercial consequences. It will be interesting to see whether that is true of the future."
Both Mr. Yang and Mr. Clinton were in China as guests of recent Yahoo investment target Alibaba.com. The China Internet Summit featured them as attendees gathered to discuss the future of online commerce and other issues pertaining to the growth of Internet usage in China, now numbering over 100 million people.
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
