68 lines
3.5 KiB
HTML
68 lines
3.5 KiB
HTML
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<title>UniForum Press Release 2 LG #29</title>
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Thursday, May 21, 1998
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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Ralph Nader's Consumer Activists Meet UniForum's Open Computing Advocates;
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Monopoly Fighters and Open Standards Experts Talk Strategy
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Columbia, MD - At the UniForum Association's Spring '98 Conference in Ocean
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City, MD, Ralph Nader and his pro-competition, anti-monopoly campaign met
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with the ideas and achievements of the UniForum Association, an international
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association of computer professionals that has long advocated a more diverse
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and interoperable marketplace. The participation of public-interest activists
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in a forward-looking industry conference produced some new ideas and
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potential alliances in their collective battle for user empowerment.
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At a keynote presentation on Monday, May 18th, Nader lauded the contribution
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that the open standards movement has made so far, citing TCP/IP and Linux as
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examples of what a free and interoperable computing marketplace can do. He
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went on to acknowledge open technologies like Unix and Apache as critical
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elements in the Internet explosion of the past several years, and the role
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that the Open Source movement played in inspiring Netscape to open their
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Communicator source code to the public.
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Citing his own experiences as a consumer activist, he urged conference
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attendees to consider government procurement policies, and how they might be
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utilized and influenced to better serve the cause of open computing.
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Historically, he pointed out, the standardization of many different industries
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has started with meeting the requirements of the federal government.
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Additionally, he pointed out that this might also be one of the best ways to
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increase private sector acceptance of open computing.
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Many attendees said they found Nader's angle enlightening; the activist
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approach clearly put some new ideas into the mix, and put a new spin on some
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old ideas. After signing autographs for his new book, Nader and his colleagues
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left the conference pledging to follow up with UniForum members on the issues
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raised.
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Especially interesting was the timing of the Justice Department's filings
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against Microsoft the very same day. Some conference attendees reported that
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the Department of Defense, while falling short in its required procurement of
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UNIX 95-compliant products, was continuing to purchase non-compliant Windows
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NT. So, while one hand of the federal government was attacking Microsoft as
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monopolistic, the other was apparently failing to support the open
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technologies that it was legally required to purchase.
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The UniForum Association is a non-profit membership organization advocating
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the development and use of computing technologies based on open, public
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standards. Open computing standards significantly increase the rate of
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innovation and provides users with more choice in computing systems. The most
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prominent example of the power of open standards is the Internet, built on an
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open internetworking standard called TCP/IP, which is what enables the diverse
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types of software and hardware to be linked together effectively.
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