Re: FISTERA - Who is Who in IST research in Europe ?

[Bernard Lang <Bernard.Lang@inria.fr>]

Mail intentionally cross-posted on several lists - reproduce freely
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To:                               (see below the letter being replied to)
Matthias Weber
Department of Technology Policy, 
ARC Systems Research GmbH 
http://www.arcs.ac.at/s/sp ;
on behalf of the FISTERA team


Dear sir,

Since you insist ...

I will not answer your request to fill out your questionnaire.

I have several good reasons for that, boiling down to 2 facts: you are
rude and incompetent.

  You are rude because you expect the people you write to to run
American software produced by Microsoft, with no provision for any
other.  I happen to be a European citizen, using European software,
and I do not see why you should expect me to abide by your policies.
  You do not even bother to apologize for this constraint you attempt
to impose on others.


You are incompetent technically because :

  - there are many sites with questionnaires that will work with any
browser, and it should have been a simple matter to see how they
operate, or to read a manual on the topic.

  - HTML standards allow to do this very easily.

You are incompetent for your project because :

  - many researchers in IT do not use Microsoft products, and a good
number of them will simply consider MS-Word files as junk mail.

  - this will necessarily bias your investigation towards people using
Microsoft environments, and thus be detrimental to software developed
in Europe (or are you doing this on purpose ?).


You are also incompetent in the way you formulate your questions, as
in :
  "Please list up to six persons in IST research whose activities
shape the direction of IST research in Europe and have, or have had, a
significant influence on your own work.  This influence may come from
publications or patents you use in your work but also from joint
research projects."

You apparently ignore that software is not patentable as such in Europe
(European Patent Convention, article 52.2).

On the other hand, you simply ignore influence through the use of
software tools, environments and applications, which is a major way of
having an impact on IST, even though software is protected by
copyright rather than patents.  Before anything else, IST is software.

It is close to undisputable that the one European person with the
greatest influence on IST in Europe is Linus Torvalds from Finland,
because of the software he created and distributed.  But from the way
you conduct your investigation there is no reason to believe his name
would crop up.

Considering that, beyond being a scandalous waste of European taxpayer
money, your investigation will most likely give a distorted view of
the European IST landscape, detrimental to both research and
industrial development, I refuse to be an accomplice to this.

Given the harm that you might cause to European economy and policies,
I consider it my duty, as a European citizen and as a scientist, to
make this answer public on all forums I can reach, so as to ensure
that the largest number of people are made aware of the worthlessness
of your investigation, biased from the outset by your prejudice.

  Sincerely,

  Bernard Lang
  Directeur de Recherche


On Thu, Oct 16, 2003 at 05:15:28PM +0200, Fistera wrote:
> 
> Dear IST researcher,
> 
> we recently asked for your assistance in a survey that tries to 'map' the 
> European actor space in IST. This survey is a part of the FISTERA project 
> (http://fistera.jrc.es), a thematic network within the IST Programme that 
> aims at developing future perspectives on information society technologies 
> in Europe.
> Unfortunately for our project, we did not receive any reaction from you. In 
> the case that our previous mail got lost, or you forgot to answer, please 
> use the link below: 
> 
> http://fistera.arcs.ac.at/questionnaire.asp?AN=bernard.lang@inria.fr&AI=795
> 
> To fill out this questionnaire should not take you more than 10 minutes. 
> Please be so kind to submit your answers by October 30th.
> Please mind that the online questionnaire only works with Microsoft 
> Explorer. In the case you prefer other browsers, we would ask you to 
> complete the  Microsoft Word (*.doc) version of our questionnaire enclosed 
> and return it to Fistera@arcs.ac.at (the sender of this message). 
> We thank you for your co-operation,
> 
> best regards
> 
> Matthias Weber
> Department of Technology Policy, 
> ARC Systems Research GmbH 
> http://www.arcs.ac.at/s/sp ;
> on behalf of the FISTERA team



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