On 12/30/21 10:36, Didier Kryn wrote:
> Le 30/12/2021 à 07:53, Steve Litt a écrit :
>> The one improvement I can suggest with the article is to define all
>> acronyms once within the text. Because I'm from North America, I call
>> it "IT", and it took 10 minutes of looking up to find out that "ICT" is
>> a European acronym for basically the same thing. It took about 25
>> minutes to find out what an "SME" is.
>
>     Thanks Steve. I'm an european and still can't remember the meaning
> of both acronyms, although I understand from the context that they name
> in some way the computer technology (~:
[snip]

( From what I remember, both acronyms, SME and ICT, were in use in the
US in the 1990s into the 2000s. Back then ICT was the preferred acronym
in the US in contexts where the activity was the focus. I gather the
focus has now shifted to who is doing the billing for the tools rather
than what the tools actually do any more.

However, there may be some change in terminology in the EU as well as I
have recently heard someone from gen Z making distinctions between IT
and ICT but I did not press for a clarification or definitions at the
time. Now I see that it could be worth finding out offline both what
people see as the distinction and where the push for a distinction is
coming from. The definitions might have changed very recently. Or it
could be a shibboleth like spelling out S Q L versus saying Sequel to
mean SQL in speech.

Either way, it is always good practice to define each and every acronym
upon their first use, since even common acronyms may have different
expansions within different fields. )

Back on topic, I appreciate the post that "jaromil" has written. The
nested subtopics make the structure hierarchical rather than linear.

The part about IBM's apparent strategy is about the right length, give
or take a little, so it would be hard to squeeze in the term
"decommoditization". However, I feel that the term might be important
enough to include because it would then link today's situation to
ongoing, long-term attempts to derail FOSS development and Linux through
the injection of artificial complexity. The strategy of
decommoditization was outlined as a threat in the 1998 leak of the
Halloween Documents. In a plot twist, IBM (once mistaken for an ally)
appears to have been able to abuse the strategy more fully than
Microsoft. One more reason to bring it up is that standardization is
mentioned, standardization implicitly includes the concept of
commodities, and commoditization of technology is so integral to FOSS
that there is a risk it has been taken for granted.

/Lars