Neelie Kroes is my new hero.
I’ve been moving away from microsoft for years.
I browse the web with Firefox. I design publications with Scribus.
And I dropped MS Office in favour of OpenOffice two years ago.
I’m writing this article using OpenOffice writer, and have over the years written countless articles and two books using the same software.
Under the hood, I still have one laptop running on XP, but said no thanks to Vista. My desktop runs Linux, as does a second laptop Ubuntu‘s Hardy Heron, if you’re interested).
Both machines run flawlessly, and the only thing stopping me from moving full-time to Linux is that I haven’t quite figured out how to get it to talk to the wireless Huawei dongle that allows me access to mobile broadband on the road.
(Any suggestions gratefully accepted).
So what has this to do with EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes?
Well, here’s what she said this week: ‘I know a smart business decision when I see one – choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed.’
‘No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.’
So say we all.
