[Gllug] EU council streaming petition

[Kristian Rink]

salsaman at xs4all.nl schrieb:

> And yet, they feel themselves sufficiently qualified to try to push
> through software patents via a backdoor. Strange is it not ?

Oh yeah, it is. But I guess these are two different kinds of people:

The software patent folks mainly seem to be patent lawyers who want to
have "old-world" law applied to new technologies, no matter how
ridiculous this might turn out to be in the end.

Public IT guys, however, are _different_. Had to deal with
administrators of small and medium cities around here, and what I learnt
this way was pretty, well, "amazing":

- Most of these folks obviously got in touch with computing during the
DOS age and then and now learnt to hate Microsoft (because of their
broken software) yet to embrace it (because there obviously was no other
option).

- More than once I heard things like "Microsoft invented the internet to
sell more copies of Windows 98 that comes with the Internet browser and
the Mail application". In this world of thoughts, the idea of relying
upon MS Exchange as the server thought of as being the "original e-mail
server implementation" seems just logical (no matter how strange this
seems to anyone else).

- Overally, quite a bunch of these people still see Microsoft as the
sole bringer of innovation, thus everyone else either is a copycat or
even stealing MS intellectual property. This is really bad.

Oh well, I'll better stop ranting now as this is in no way related to
the thread at all. Anyhow, I am afraid that this is the kind of people
we have to deal wit in public institutions. The very moment an
administrator of a really small city hall ( < 10 workstations, same
amount of users, two network printers and a dialup DSL internet
connection) asks you (as the "solution provider") to set up a Windows
2003 AD server and an MS Exchange environment to finally be able to
"manage his network", you just stop asking any questions. :(

Cheers,
Kris

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
jab: kawazu at jabber.ccc.de * icq: 48874445 * fon: ++49 176 2447 2771
"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
is the beginning of a new reality." (Hundertwasser)
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