Why Open Standards Matter 158
Tina Gasperson over at Newsforge (Also owned by VA Software) has an interesting writeup about her experience at the Government Day sub-conference at LinuxWorld Boston. Government Day addressed some interesting issues including some of the more tangible reasons behind supporting open standards. From the article: "Speaking to the audience of government workers, Villa said, 'Maybe 2006 is not the year that Linux ends up on your desktops.' But, he encouraged them, if they begin using software that supports open standards now, such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org, then when Linux is ready it will be that much easier to make a switch. 'And maybe you'll decide not to make that switch,' Villa said. 'But at least the choice will be yours.'"
Getting the point across (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if you had to go to the maker of your car for servicing no matter how old it gets, and independent mechanics could not exist.
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Worse, imagine that your car (Car 97), even though perfectly working as far as you're concerned, developes a fault after six years (say it leaks oil everwhere you go) and the garage says that they don't produce parts for those anymore, you have to upgrade to the latest model of Car (Car 2003)...
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Nope! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nope! (Score:2, Interesting)
When I studied computer science in the late 1980s, as a teenager I naively *assumed* that the world ran on open standards.
What other kind of standards are there after all? If it's not published it's not a standard. I spent many months learning the (then) relatively new OSI model, soaking up IEEE papers on how ethernet and RS232 worked. All that seemed perfectly normal to me. The very definition of a general purpose computing and communication device almost *must* be based on open publishe
Re:Nope! (Score:2, Interesting)
Mass is a property shared by all matter. But people weigh themselves in stones, their babies in pounds, loose produce by asking for pounds or ounces and getting an equivalent amount in grammes, and buy pre-packed goods weighed in [kilo]grammes. It never occurs to them to think that they could weigh everything in kilogrammes and be able to compare their own mass to their baby or a bag of cement or a tub of colesl
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Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
You might have payed those royalties as part of buying your CD burner and/or your CD-R. I don't know, but I could imagine it.
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
You pasted a snippet from an earlier comment of mine ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182627&cid=15
=D
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Look at the music CD. I believe it was Philips that collected the benefits for that for a long time. Not sure if they still do.
The patent has expired, but they have a trademark on the term "CD." They still refuse to let nonstandard discs use that moniker, like DRM'd pseudo-CDs.
There is a difference between closed standards that you let nobody else use (like *.doc), closed standards that you control, but let others use (like *.pdf) or open ones that are made by a commity (like *.html)
I disagree with y
Re:Getting the point across (Score:3, Insightful)
Your heart is in the right place, but this doesn't strike me as a great example just on the grounds that somebody (like me..) would go "huh? Betamax works on all betamax players!" A better example
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
It's actually a requirement by the EPA that the codes CANNOT be read or erased without a tool.
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Re:Getting the point across (Score:2)
Re:Standards drive innovation - use legislation (Score:2)
Obviously standards created using this traditional approach are going to be adopted more readily than an approach that is designed to be an alternative to the existing leading technologies.
why it takes time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:why it takes time... (Score:3, Informative)
You haven't used Linux in a few years have you? I find that most of the time installing quality software on Linux is no harder than installing the windows counterpart. Most of the time, you don't need anything outside your distro's packaging system, so installing and finding stuff is much easier. If you try to compile everything from source, you're going to have problems. And you'd have
Re:why it takes time... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an old troll that is getting tiresome.
Last time I had to install Windows (a few months ago when my daughter's laptop was overrun with spyware, etc.), it took more than a day to install XP, update and patch it, install firewall, virus scanner (and update them), then install MS Office (and update and patch it), plus other software that she used.
Last time I installed Linux, it was also on a laptop (Ubuntu on an IBM
author mistaken? (Score:5, Insightful)
We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont
we?
HTML, TCP/IP, GSM, PCI , XMPP ( jabber, google talk ).. etc. etc.
Re:author mistaken? (Score:4, Insightful)
Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv
Re:author mistaken? (Score:5, Insightful)
We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont we?
Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv
Even more interesting: compare which of the above said standards actually fostered growth in technology and paved new ways of doing business:
The first set brought everyone the web, the internet, mobile phones, a plethora of choices for expansion cards, etc... all going down price-wise. Alot of opportunities of doing business also.
The second ones, well... made us have to pick certain platforms/vendors to be relevant... I don't know about everyone else, but over here the price of windows or Office is not going down! Magic food indeed.
Re:author mistaken? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is A standard. Not an open one with the full meaning of the word open. Can I make a GPL application that will legally play wmv files? Can I make a closed source freeware application that can play wmv files without paying a royality to microsoft? I would happily admit I am wrong if you provide me links to the opposite...
Re:author mistaken? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
It might be problem for you that open standard isn't free as in beer. But it is still open s
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
Actually you do. Only thing that is excluded is those who want to use the standard completely free as in beer...
Two, you need the permition of the one holding the patent to develop an application that utilizes it.
Thats part of the open standard process, anyone gets permission and lisence to the patents fo
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, if you utilize the decoder that ships with windows. The licensing cost of the decoder is integrated in the windows license. If I'm developing a windows only app, I'm ok. But what happens when I want to port the application to linux or any non microsoft OS? I'll have to make use of patented technology. No
Re:author mistaken? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:5, Informative)
Not open.
iTunes
Not a file format. iTunes does, however, work with standards such as MP3 and MP4. Neither of these are quite open, since you need to pay a small royalty to implement them. AIFF, also supported by iTunes, is open, however.
SWF
Probably counts as half-open. You are free to download the spec and implement things that write SWF files, but not things that read them.
MOV
This is an open standard, and is the official container format for MP4 bytestreams. Not all of the bytestreams embedded in MOV containers are open, however, but it is possible to put something like a Vorbis/Theora stream in one.
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
author not mistaken. (Score:2)
Not as much as we should:
MS Office (DOC, XLS, PPT, MDB), MS Outlook (PST), File Systems and Sharing(FAT, SMB), Non-ANSI SQL (T-SQL, PL-SQL), etc....
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/patents.html [digitalelite.com]
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
HTML is arguably not open. Since HTML is an SGML application, you need to know SGML's parsing rules in order to parse it properly. SGML is the ISO 8879:1986 standard [iso.org] that costs ~140 EUR / 170 USD / 100 GBP to read.
You can decide not to pay for the standard and wing it instead, which is what browser developers have typically done, and which is why practically none of them can parse HTML correctly.
In my opinion, if you have to pay to read a standard in order to process documents correctly, then you c
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
HTML is not a subset of SGML, nothing even remotely close, it's an SGML application, and you do need to understand SGML parsing rules to parse HTML properly.
I know very well where to find the HTML specifications, and if you actually read them (shocking idea, I know), you will find that it doesn't fully describe how to parse HTML, because the whole point of using SGML as a base is because all this stuff has already been specified decades ago. Some HTML specifications include a brief summary or tutorial
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
That's kinda the downside of the open standard...The company that takes the standard, and bends it to fit their agenda, then propogates the bent standard to the world.
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:2)
Re:author mistaken? (Score:3, Informative)
When you're ahead... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course "open source" can hardly be defined as a company.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When you're ahead... (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course there are branches (like where I'm in) where things are mostly secret and the actual cost of internal development is lower than the cost of leaking information (which could just be a way of doing things).
I think in the end it mostly depends on the type of business you're in.
False dichotomy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:When you're ahead... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:When you're ahead... (Score:2)
Re:When you're ahead... (Score:2)
Well, no big surprise there, to me at least.
1) Shutting out competitors, consumer lock-in
2) Easier to develop, whatever you ship IS the standard
3) If you need a feature just add it without the buerocracy
4) Choose what platforms you want it on, in case you have a vested interest in that
5) Make competitors sp
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, Apple won't do this because it is better for them (for the time being) to have people locked into iPods rather
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be forgetting option C), namely "or not upgrade their OS at all".
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
I have programs that don't run anymore, could you rethink your statement ?
And launching a program is not enough, it has to work too.
Virtualdub tool to acquire video from my TV card did not work anymore, the software for my Miro card won't even launch anymore on WIndows XP, Theme Park wil crash constantly when it launches. That's
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
I know a specific category of Win2K programs that don't work on XP: CD writing software. Microsoft dropped the ASPI interface in XP (although you can download it from Adaptec's site), which several major programs required. I imagine that Roxio and Nero weren't too happy about that.
In general, though, drivers and programs that perform hardware-related tasks are the least likely to work with newer versions of Windows. DOS programs are the only ones
Re:Starts with DRM (Score:2)
Having said that, I have lots of LucasArts games, so ScummVM is a great help.
You missed one... (Score:4, Interesting)
But another hugely significant factor is Government/Public Sector usage. Most Governments see themselves as in it for the long term - maybe not in the form of the current administration, or even the current socioeconomic model - however, even through major changes the survival of the information is paramount. Even to the extent of a ridiculous waste of resources.
To this end, they will probably see (e.g.) Microsoft as a threat to their knowledge base - envisioning that their bureaucratic empires will long see off the demise of such structures (they have a point, as most bureaucracies are far older than any other organisation currently in existance). For this reason we are seeing more and more public sector organisations leaning towards open standards (the most prominent example of late being Massachusetts).
It is worth remembering the importance of public sector contracts to the world's economies - they have a lot of influence.
Open Standards (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open Standards (Score:2)
2006? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:2006? (Score:2)
2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001 were the years of the Linux Desktop. I still have my Linux Magazines to prove it. After all, it was mentioned every January or February issue...
Re:2006? (Score:2)
Linux Affecting MS Sales?
Contributed by CmdrTaco on Sat Jan 10 at 10:27AM EST
[Linux] From the up-and-coming-os dept
Evelyn Mitchell sent us this story where you can read about slowdowns in Client OS sales. According to the article, Microsoft still controls 87% of the operating systems sold last year. The gem though is the comments about IS managers evaluating free OS's like Linux. Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world
You got the number wrong. (Score:2)
wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?
Here, lemme fix it for you.
wait, so 2060 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?
There ya go! Looks better now, doesn't it?
Maybe not this year... (Score:2)
At the risk of sounding troll-ish I love how variations (is / is not) of this phrase have been going on since KDE 1.0 was released in 1998. It's taken at least 8 years of "Maybe Linux will be ready for the desktop this year" for someone to finally say "Actually, maybe it won't"!
I sincerely hope it *does* end up on the common 'desktop' one day, but it's not looking too likely at this rate
Back on topic, aren't even Microsoft opening their Wo
Re:Maybe not this year... (Score:3, Insightful)
and as long as their schema mentioned <SecretProprietaryExtension> as a valid container, then it would be valid XML. If they really wanted to arse it up for their competitors, they could describe the document entirely within the secret proprietary extension; b
Re:Maybe not this year... (Score:2)
Re:Maybe not this year... (Score:2)
So no, it's not Open...sigh...
Re:Maybe not this year... (Score:2)
My point in the talk... (Score:2)
Neo: "What are you trying to tell me?" ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Neo: "What are you trying to tell me?" ... (Score:2)
Open Standards...nothing new (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that we sit here and beat our drums, but someone comes along and says "when Linux is ready..."
Last I heard there were many organizations (Government, etc.) already using Linux on the desktop. I'm sure they will tell you it is ready.
Re:Open Standards...nothing new (Score:2)
In short.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Standards Do Not Matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Many people, and many businesses, are committing their entire lives to digital storage under a plethora of proprietary, closed standards. One by one, the suppliers who created these standards will cease to exist -- companies will go out of business, or be bought up and asset-stripped.
What does this mean? The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment. None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable. Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
But a generation from now, nobody will even remember that Open Standards ever existed. Everything will be locked up behind proprietary standards, jealously-guarded secrets. If you're allowed to program your own computer at all, you'll be severely restricted in what you can do with it.
And nobody will care. The problem will be thought of as "just one of the unforeseen hazards of trusting electronics", and lived with. By that stage we will already have draconian DRM in documents, and in most cases it will be so badly misconfigured that there will be no cut-and-paste; an operator will end up having to use two computers and two monitors, retyping information from one screen onto the other. All this will just be thought of as the way the world naturally works.
Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter (Score:2, Insightful)
JPEG? (Okay, I'll admit that I ought to convert the NEFs for storage one of these days.)
None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable.
CDDA? MP3?
Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
Okay, I'll give you DOC.
Open standards (or at least easily-licensed enough standards to be on a par with open) are nearly ubiquitous, and widely supported for both reading an
Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter (Score:3, Interesting)
In a No Limit Poker game, once one player has more money than all the others put together, they are -- barring extraordinarily bad play -- mathematically certain to walk away with every chip on the table. That's the position Microsoft are in now.
government-approved applications (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't have the memo handy, but if I recall, it applied only to PCs and Macs. I'm not sure if "PC" means a "Windows PC" or if it also includes Linux PCs. So that may or may not leave the door open to OpenOffice (or other ODF-based suites) for Linux at least.
In any case, this mandate really burns me. Just when the world may be ready to start abandoning the MS monopoly, my organization is trying to reinforce it for "security" reasons.
The other thing that gets me is that if I protest, most of my colleagues will think I just have some sort of quirky, neurotic aversion to MS because Bill Gates is "too rich" or something. You'd be amazed how many otherwise well-informed technical people out there are truly clueless about the standards war going on.
Re:government-approved applications (Score:2)
No, it's not *that* bad. I don't think they will ever do anything like that. But I've been wrong before.
"When Linux is ready" (Score:3, Insightful)
Could the author explain why Linux isn't ready for office use? In my opinion it's been "ready" for several years, and only getting better. (And no snarky comments about lack of games, that doesn't apply to an office environment)
When Linux is ready *for you* (Score:2)
Re:"When Linux is ready" (Score:2)
Re:"When Linux is ready" (Score:2)
Then please do tell us why OpenOffice 2 isn't "decent".
Re:"When Linux is ready" (Score:2)
The existence of OO is important, of course, as competition for MS, and it has some nice features (print to PDF etc). In my experience, OO2 is somewhere around "Office 96.5" - p
The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad. (Score:2)
Condemning people for not using Linux instead of Windows, and the strong-arm tactics of some proprietary software makers that try to lock people into a certain product, are just two sides of the same coin.
I wonder if she would consider me irrational for saying that free software is overwhelmingly superior to Microsoft? That's M$'s FUD machine working as planned. It's the end result of a lot of Astroturfing and it's time to put a stop to it.
Tina has bought into a lot of FUD to say
Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad. (Score:2)
You might not use the features in Office that OpenOffice doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that nobody uses them. Where I work, I constantly come across documents that use Word's revision tracking. It's not something I use, but it's an extremely handy feature that, frankly, OpenOffice doesn't do well.
All of this is rather silly (Score:3, Insightful)
Open Office is improving all the time, some of the components(I only really use word processing) are almost as good as the Microsoft equivilants. The document format is standard and can be replicated by any application which wants to do so.
However, it hasn't been, you can't just open an Open Office document, you have to install Open or Star Office, or possibly some other freeware application. Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard.
If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it. If you send them an OpenOffice document, odds are they won't be able to open it. The purpose of these sorts of files is to store and transfer data, if the person I'm sending that document to can't open it, then it doesn't matter whether the file is open or closed, because it has no practical purpose.
You can argue about the value of open standards till you're blue in the face, but if everyone can't open it without substantial effort(downloading a 100 meg file is substantial effort), if they can't edit it without substantial effort, then it doesn't have any value at all.
You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.
Re:All of this is rather silly (Score:2)
Just say Esperanto, you're not insulting anybody here.
But yes, I agree with you. Added to that, Word documents have features that OpenDoc doesn't have specifications for. It's interesting that Microsoft (if I remember correctly) has joined the OpenDoc
Re:All of this is rather silly (Score:2)
Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard. If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it.
First, I disagree with your characterization of the state of the industry/computing world. If someone sends a Word file somewhere the other person might be able to open it. Many will
Re:About Open standards (Score:5, Informative)
If the standard is Closed (ie proprietary), then the owner of the standard can change it and you are stuffed unless you stick with the software provided by the owner of the standard... this, of course, leaves you open to your data being held hostage subject to you remaining on the upgrade treadmill...
if you are using Open Standards and the supplier of your closed source software software goes belly up, then your data isn't held hostage or lost because someone else is highly likely to already support that same Open Standard
Re:Stick toMS products -- stay cool and be HAPPY! (Score:2)
you can't sit back and relax with Microsoft... didn't you know, you have to bend over, grasp your ankles and brace... and don't forget the upgrade treadmill... who else would call their own customers dinosaurs for sticking with Office 97. It's Office 97 users being ridiculed in those commercials... their own cust
Re:About Open standards (Score:2)
Re:best reason to use open standards... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:best reason to use open standards... (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish I could suggest a better approach, but the thing is, it's really just a technical issue. It has social ramifi