Neelie Kroes' speech dispels any doubts that closed, proprietary standards are going to be shunned in place of open standards. She also very clearly mentions the cost savings to the public from the adoption of free open standards (which most certainly includes open-source software). Her mention of Microsoft's standards-trickery and financial costs to the public makes this very clear.

It is also notable that this stated intent of the EU digital agenda is incompatible with:

- Proprietary DRM locks.
- Royalty-encumbered media codecs like H-264.
- IP-related corporate witch-hunts and lawsuits against individuals and companies.

...as all of these can be avoided through the use of open standards, open source software, and open "fair trade" media.

The world's people should be free to communicate with each other without the fear of oppression from power-mad software and media companies/organizations (like Microsoft, Apple, and the media cartels).

Open-source software can now do everything that expensive proprietary software used to do. Musicians can now produce their own material and sell directly to the public without the necessity of greedy, litigation-happy "middle-men" like the RIAA. The same thing is becoming possible for movies without the involvement of the greedy MPIAA, and authors directly producing e-books without the need for a bloated publishing company to take the lions-share cut out of their profits. For example, books could soon be sold directly by authors through the Android app-store.

Vice-President Kroes is a shining example of a person who obviously has the best interests of the public at heart (i.e. the forgotten definition of what a public servant is "supposed" to do). There are far too many politicians in the "back pockets" of rich media and software companies, and this has resulted in the rapid erosion of personal rights and freedoms throughout the world. The EU is leading us out of this madness.

I would like to point out that Vice-President Kroes's speech does not contain a reference to open source (the speech is available at http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/10/300). She mostly spoke about standards, including open standards.

Moreover, she does not want to copy or mirror the W3C or OASIS in Europe but make it easier to use such organisations' standards in European legislation and procurement.

Finally, it may be worth noting that the speech actually describes in some more detail Mrs Kroes's thinking behind pages 14-16 of the European Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/documents/digital-agenda-communication-en.pdf).