Slashdot Mirror
Perens Pushes "Sincere Choice" for Software
jalefkowit writes "Looks like Bruce Perens has found something to keep him occupied, now that he's parted ways with HP: the Register is covering his launch of a new political platform, "Sincere Choice", which he wrote to clarify the distinctions between the values of the open-source community and the Microsoft-funded Institute for Software Choice. Sincere Choice addresses several issues in critical to open software, including interoperability, competition by merit, open standards, and copyright."
Isn't it funny how the call for "open standards" always translates into "our version doesn't have half the features, so let's compete on what we have in common"?
You can forget Microsoft ever taking part in THIS initiative...
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Microsoft-funded Institute for Software Choice.
You have one choice. Microsoft.
One thing I really like is the whole file format issue. Already OpenOffice is great with m$ office files. If the govt and other institutions were able to settle on open file formats then that basically knocks one leg out from m$. m$ will probably try their hardest not to have this happen , obviously.
I'm not so big on forcing the govt (even tho i am helping to foot the bill) use this or that. As long as there is no file format lock in, then Linux and other non-m$ os's have a better than good chance getting business. Spread the wealth again. If adopted somehow or thise gains wide attention, then there will be more of the pie for others. Good approach.
I read the founding principles, everything sounded all warm and fuzzy.
I clicked a link on the DHTML menu bar, to view the members of this new effort.
My menu disappeared...
MY advice Bruce, is this: if you want to provide open competition and all that, do not write your website in IE code!
When faced with a problem, many web developers say "I know, I'll use JavaScript!".
Now they have two problems.
"Bruce Perens writes: "At the San Francisco Chronicle's SF Gate, Hal Plotkin points to Sincere Choice as the right compromise for an IT renaissance in Government including both Open Source and proprietary software. The article is extremely flattering to yours truly, but a good push in the right direction from a well-respected commentator." "
Should, but thanks to MS they can't. MS has made so many pripietary(sp) standards of their own, this is where things fail.
If he can convince Billy Gates and M$ to use more open standards then I think the rest will be easy.
Only 'flamers' flame!
The only reason to use undocumented file formats instead of XML-marked or other, clearly documented formats is to lock users into your own products and to force upgrades. Plus, it obscures the sheer amount of junk and waste packed into those binary monsters.
Sincere Choice site doen't display properly in Mozilla (try one of the menus item). Isn'this odd far the police they ar proporting???????
Hmmm ... reminds me of Tobacco Research Institute founded by guess whom? For years they've been claiming that the smoke is good for you. Expect the same level of integrity from Institute for Software Choice.
he said "Bruce penis"
Oh, wait, no he didn't, my mistake.
Where is the DHTML code on this page?"
/. articles properly BECAUSE I'm an idiot"?
Bruce's site uses straight HTML, no graphics at all...
I think Rune69 may have got confused and went to (the alleged) Microsoft run Software Choice site, which DOES use DHTML
Can you say "I'm an idiot"?
How about "I can't read
Here's the problem:
<meta name="generator" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
...but never will. I'm no Microsoft fan, but there are a few things they've done right (!) - Office and DirectX come to mind. I like Office. Sure, it's bloated, but it works pretty damn well for most people. I like DirectX because I like games, and they all seem to be coded around it. So while I may never use a Microsoft OS, I'd love to see some real software choice. I'd love to be able to run a native install of Office on Mandrake. I'd love to be able to play linux versions of more games. If MS would realize that they can sell software without selling you the whole OS I'm sure they could sell some apps for other OS's and still sell Windows. That's all I want.
do not read this line twice.
I wonder why they didn't call it Free Choice. Its so easy to abort an installation of Windows and to install another OS.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
I agree with some of the things he advocates, but the follow is so wrong and bad I can't believe it:
No user should be required to use a particular product simply because other users do. Competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards.
Sheesh, you're saying that companies and/or the government (PARTICULARLY the latter) should everyone run different software? And the IT departments are supposed to support every oddball application, just because a user is too lazy and/or stubborn and/or religious to learn a different one? And in the case of the government, MY TAX DOLLARS are supposed to support this?
I'm sorry, but if you hate Microsoft that much and want to use something else, go to a company that uses the software that you want to use.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Did I hear incorrectly?
"Microsoft-funded Institute for Software Choice "
Riiiiiight...
From the "Institute for Software Choice" news page, they provide a link entitled "ISC response to SF Gate, Perens Article" (/. discussion of that article here).
Their link? A Microsoft Word document.
ISC: If you are an organisation claiming to promote open standards, why in the world are you releasing data in the very, very closed DOC format?
MORTAR COMBAT!
It's probably a good thing that he's playing down his departure from HP. It shows that he's already put it behind him and is ready for the next challenge. Now, I'm not 100% behind him on Sincere Choice but it's a move in the right direction for sure.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Has he been hit with trademark infringement yet?
I can understand giving open source software equal consideration when searching for the best solutionn, but, as we have seen with the recent rash of stories about forcing governments to use open source software, that is rarely the case with such people advocating software choice.
I have often heard people here talk about using the best tool for the job (usually, this is a belief stated in the context of a language flamewar or something else where there are several different ways to accomplish something). However, how are we to know that this "Sincere Choice" initiative isn't simply a front for those who would want to force software of inferior quality upon an organization or government just because it is open source, while downplaying the advantages of more mature and/or feature-rich closed source products? I have seen this happen many times before, where a few zealots get out of hand and start demanding their way or the highway, productivity and efficiency be damned. Is this really the kind of single-minded world view that we want to see in the Free Software community, where choice is king? Furthermore, is it entirely honest of Mr. Perens to imply objectivity when he is clearly a biased player?
Please report back when someone has come up with a real proposal for disseminating the objective facts about closed and open source choices.
Any other ideas?
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
They claimed that they would respond to my request shortly, and I'll be sure to post an update if one should arrive.
MORTAR COMBAT!
> ... and government should all be free to set their own policies regarding what sorts of software they will acquire and use.
I'd object to this. Governments should be required to use only software that is amenable to public examination. Otherwise the citizens will have no control over or access to their government's data.
We can see this clearly in the new voting equipment that's being installed in parts of Florida. They've bought equipment that contains closed, proprietary software. Citizens can't validate the outcome of elections using this software. Attempting to do so may even be illegal, under the DMCA. So anyone who can bribe the software vendors can control the election.
In general, people should be free but governments shouldn't. Governments should be accountable to their citizens. Proprietary software would be a major barrier to such accountability.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm not sure what verb you wanted in the middle of "the government should everyone run", so I'll skip that. IT departments can choose to use whatever software they want to support. Users can use what is supported, or (assuming they have a license) other software. The open file formats mean that one person using not-institutionally-supported software does not put that person out of the productivity loop.
The IT department could even say to employees "You *must* use software package X here." Sincere Choice has no objection to that. It only objects to "You *must* use software package X because our customers/friends/etc use X."
Don't conflate two distinct issues just to have a strawman you can whine about.
Is it really sincere since when I browse the website using Mozilla the menu seems to screw up on me. But yet when I use IE it works fine...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Not for nothing, but does anyone else think that Bruce Perens and RMS look like Ben and Jerry?
It might be the other way around, I can never remember which is the rotund one.
-
Validate www.softwarechoice.org
-
Validate sincerechoice.com
Well, I think it's clear who stands for open standards and interoperability.If you'd like to know more about how to use validators to make your websites interoperable, read my article Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications.
Thank you for your attention.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
this irony will be lost on the 90% of the world that has Word installed and can read .doc documents
.txt ones.
.txt document.
.doc (we have a bit more leeway with MS Office products in my department than most do).
.doc format attachment do not even warrant a reply, other than a form letter requesting that they present the information in another format, if they want me to read it.
.doc format. You're missing out on the input of hundreds of very, very talented SUN and other UNIX software engineers.
not even 90% of the world even own computers, let alone computers powerful enough to run the latest versions of Word (which are incompatible with earlier versions).
as easily as
If I walked down the halls of the building I work in, I would pass the offices of over 500 software developers, and less than 10% would be able to read Word documents. 100% of them could read a
If I went to the next building at my complex, and did the same thing, there would be even fewer who could read
If I walked through my neighborhood, less than 10% of the people even own a computer.
Most people who send me a
Shrug, keep sending your
MORTAR COMBAT!
I like poop
Word is a nightmare for any complex document. As your document gets larger it degrades -- strange lockups, images jumping around, strange inconsistencies (the document looks different on win98 then it does on win2k, oh shit, what is our publisher using?), and things that just don't work right because you cant edit the codes by hand.
Similarly, the DirectX API is a mess, which to MS's credit they are working on fixing (lots of positive changes in DX8), but it's still a mess. You also have to remember anytime you use DirectX or Word, MS has you exactly where they want you - using their products on their OS ... so they didn't really do the world a favor. Overall DirectX did some good though as modern games just wouldn't be possible without it (imagine the development costs/times for writing drivers for every 3d accelerator).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Bruce seems to be the kind of guy who is prepared to stand up for his principles, and the principles embodied in his work on the Open Source movement.
I'm sure many of us would not be prepared to quit our day-jobs because our employers were infringing on our ability to advocate our beliefs.
Many thanks Bruce, for not compromising your position and selling out to HP, and I hope Sincere Choice is well-recieved the world over.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
It boggles the mind why OSS/FS word processors keep developing new formats. Who cares if the format is "open" if no one uses it? MS Word .Doc files are insufficent as a standard because they're undocumented, which is why converters are still flakey in many cases.
RTF, on the other hand, does almost everything you need. It's missing OLE (99.999% of don't people need that), and it's missing VB Macros (100% of people don't need that), but it covers everything that most people are going to do. It's fully and completely documented. It's Word-compatible. It's WordPerfect-compatible. It's compatible with most OSS word processors. Heck, with the right software it's Palm OS compatible!
Yet some OSS word processors (read: KWord) still don't support it. And they all invent their own formats. How does that encourage progression away from Ubiquitous MS Word?
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
But buried deep in this particular notion of interoperability is the following thought: a single format should be sufficient for all applications written for a specific domain. This thought suffers in two important ways:
- To differentiate their product, corporations must add new features; new features very often impose new requirements on persistence format and hence break interoperability.
- Standards bodies move far slower than the companies implementing said standards, often making true interoperability difficult.
I'm not really sure how to avoid these problems. For example, it is not sufficient to add (as has been suggested) a "generic app-specific XML container" to a given standard format. To properly reproduce a document, knowledge of the content in said container might be required.And as for problems with standards bodies: is it any wonder that Microsoft embraces and extends? Look, for example, at the current disaster of XML Schema, a standard wrought at the hands of academics. Anyone who has used XML Schema in a sophisticated manner can report that the standard lacks a coherent notion of cardinality. Should a company wait until this is repaired by committee, or should it simply embrace what has been done and extend it to meet current needs?
The GNU/HURD system sounds alot like QNX and is very interesting technology. You just dont understand. =)
GNU/HURD
Pixels keep you awake!
Dear Sirs,
I write with reference to the story linked from your news page entitled "ISC response to SF Gate, Perens Article". I note with interest that the linked document appears to be a document in Microsoft's "Word" format. Regretably I am unable to open this document since I do not pirate software and cannot afford a license for MS Office when I only write the occaisional letter. I would be most interested to learn why software choice chose to publish in this format, requiring a software purchase to allow me to view it, rather than in html - which, I would suggest, is a more appropriate format for web publishing. This would also have permitted me a free choice of software with which to view it. Isn't this what your organisation is promoting?
I look forward to recieving your explanation.
(Chuckles)
That's what "Contact Us" pages are for isn't it?
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.
Pretty fast turnaround on response, but I would have appreciated, oh, a "yes" or "no" or "we'll think about it"!
MORTAR COMBAT!
Oh, you mean like .jpg or .gif? Yea, you're right. Clearly M$ has exploited those via that crazy browser thingy they have called Internet Explorer. Man, if we could only get those back into "proprietary" format again.
1) Create proprietary file type on *nix 2) ???? 3) Profit!
Yep. Just like they planned.
If only he were using an open-source format for his letters....
p00p is good food
Since this entire argument is about computer stored files, anyone without a computer is pretty damn SOL. Maybe we should store all the data on paper. In Esperanto. After all, that's the official universal language, right?
.doc, and I guarantee further than not even 90% of Californians, by a great, great margin have that capability.
That is exactly one of the points of the Peruvian and Argentinian arguments against proprietary software. If they are going to be running their government on-line, then every citizen must have access. Thus, every citizen must have access to a computer capable of communicating with the government software. Thus, if the government wants to run itself on-line, it has to provide these computers.
It is much, much cheaper for the Peruvian government to set out terminals running free software than running Office XP.
The point is, the Peruvian government isn't going to make 90% of its people buy Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, and neither should the United States government. As more and more government services are offered on-line, is it fair to continue distributing those services in Microsoft Word format? Or is it more fair to ensure that the format is open, so that free software can be used?
Wow, way to take things out of context!
That is the context we are talking about. Specifically, the ISC's challenge to the governments of Peru, Columbia, Italy, and others, and the State of California requiring the use of open standards in all government computing services, and Bruce Parens' rebuke of that challenge. I guaranteee you that 90% of the people of Peru do not own computers capable of viewing
Thus, as I said, the state then has to provide the means to access, and it can either buy 1 million PCs running Windows XP, and Office XP, and "hope" that there are no surprses in licensing down the line, or it can run software built on open standards.
Of the personal computers in the US, the vast majority (90% or more I'd be willing to bet) are capable of reading a Word document.
Yes, technically my computer is "capable" of reading a Microsoft Word Document. I could go out and buy a copy of Office XP for $400 dollars, or whatever it costs nowadays. I could take the hours to download OpenOffice. But neither is a good solution to the problem, which is the closed format itself.
Shrug, keep your holier-than-thou attitude
Sorry if I came off that way, I am quite aware that I am a loser.
MORTAR COMBAT!
...new features very often impose new requirements on persistence format and hence break interoperability.
This does not necessarily follow - new features are usually additional features, implying that their persistent form will be an extension or compatible subtype of the existing format. Adding elements to well-formed (but not DTD-valid) XML file is a straightforward example.
Standards bodies move far slower than the companies implementing said standards, often making true interoperability difficult
This is a good realist position - interoperability is one thing, exact semantic equivalence allowing round-trip transfer of documents between MS Word, StarOffice, KDE Word etc. is quite another.
I suspect most people would put up with a lowest-common-denominator format such as RTF, as long as the bar wasn't set too low.
I damn well wish there was an open format that was widely accepted, but there isn't.
.doc is capable of (like keeping deleted info around in the file so that people might read things you dont want them to read....)
Rich Text Format (RTF) is open and can be read/written by MS Word, MS Wordpad, and almost any other word processor.
If widely used, it would also put an end to workplace email attachment virus epidemics, among other things that the lovely
By the way, there's no need to resort to name calling. Just because I'm not a hard line FSF zealot doesn't mean that I work for Microsoft PR or anything of the sort. Your people seem to be far too immersed in a black-and-white, us-versus-them mentality.
OpenGL == Direct3D
OpenGL != DirectX.
Hint: Both Direct3D and OpenGL run on DirectX on Windows.
Learn the difference, and please stop posting until you do.
You wrote: ``Just because I'm not a hard line FSF zealot doesn't mean that I work for Microsoft PR or anything of the sort."
I'm not a hard-line FSF zealot either -- in fact I think RMS is a obsessive jerk. However, everything you have so far posted convinces me at least one of the following is true:
(1) You work for Microsoft, either as a direct employee, a contractor, or a consultant with MSCE after your name;
(2) You have bought entirely into the myth that MS has created the Personal Computer, & does nothing but good for humanity;
(3) You idolize one or more of MS's employees, & think that they walk on water.
Let this thread end, before you prove any further that you are a distributor of FUD.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Never underestimate the power of p00p
Listen, you are exactly the narrow-minded us-versus-them maniac that I was talking about. Am I the only one reminded of the part in American History X where the skinhead girl starts screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!" when she finds out that her ex-boyfriend is no longer a Nazi? You guys love to call people names when you can't find a cogent argument with which to refute them.
So read carefully...
- Microsoft is not the only software company in the world. I've heard that there were at least 2 or 3 others (In fact, I'm using Adobe Photoshop right now, and last time I checked, they are not owned by Microsoft).
- Not everyone who thinks that you should use the best tool for the job is some kind of PR flack with a software company to promote.
- Be sure to read that last bullet point again, because the next one is related to it...
- In some catagories of applications, there are closed source tools that do the job better than the open source tools that have been written.
Now, I know that's an awful lot for you kids to digest in the short 20 minutes that it took you to read it, but perhaps if you sit and ponder it for an hour or two, my meaning will sink in.HTH!
What you said would probably not make an economist agree.
If you have open standards and interoperability, you lower the barrier to changing products. That tends to *help* superior products come out on top.
May we never see th
In my experience, RTF is no more compatible than cross platform DOC filters. It works most of the time, but it's still unreliable. An RTF created by one program may not work with another, even on the same platform. Your chances are a lot better if you stick to mainstream fonts, etc., but few people know which ones those are. If you can get everyone to agree which programs, versions, and fonts to use, RTF is workable, but it's still a big pain.
But I suppose everyone would rather use browsers that "support web site enhancing features" like screwing around with your browsing environment.
May we never see th
...if the DOC file got infected with a macro virus.
May we never see th
How about requiring government-purchased software to use only open protocols and formats? That would reduce vendor lock-in, and would make it possible for Microsoft to make a bid (they'd just have to open .doc).
May we never see th
OTOH... OpenOffice 1.0.1 is pretty damn impressive, too. There's really nothing you can do in Microsoft Office you can't do in OpenOffice, and OpenOffice is free. It's your call.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
> Am I the only one
> reminded of the part in American History X where the skinhead girl starts screaming "NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER!"
> when she finds out that her ex-boyfriend is no longer a Nazi?
No further comment is needed.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
You really don't have anything worthwhile to contribute.
Run "strings" on the file. It's at the end. A few people's names.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
There is always Alladin Ghostscript or the OS Ghostscript that trails a version or two behind the Alladin version (which is still effectively free). It still isn't easy to use and you have to still create the Postscript with the right info in it (the cpd file in an Adobe driver).
I used Visio commercially, hated it, and switched to Dia, which is IMHO one of the few pieces of open source software that beats the commercial alternatives (actually, haven't tried Rational Rose, which some people there seemed to like).
It takes *forever* to enter info into Visio.
May we never see th
SLIP was done on a napkin.
May we never see th
I should go to the country where government doesn't use Microsoft word? This is taking monopoly way too far, don't you think?
Sure, we all typically find common file formats useful.... I don't think there's much question of that. Fact is though, software companies will *always* invent proprietary file formats. For starters, they may wish to offer functionality that the competition doesn't yet offer. By using some "common file format", they might lose the ability to build the new features into the saved files.
.GIF, .JPG, .BMP, .TIFF or many other formats. You don't have to use Adobe's proprietary .PSD format. Same with the MS Office products. People can save their documents as ASCII text if they want, or a multitude of other formats (like WordPerfect). Not only that, but MS does offer freely downloadable document viewers for their Access databases, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents. Someone running Windows (or likely even WINE in Linux) could at least view what they get in email with one of those viewer utilities - without spending another dime to license Office itself.
In my experience, the most commonly-used packages always provide alternatives. In Photoshop, for example, you can save your file as
The argument that a company is "required to buy MS software because another company uses it" just doesn't seem to hold a lot of water.
Cash, card or cheque?
What planet do you guys live on? On the one that I inhabit, all cars come with full shop manuals. You can simply order them, and for a few bucks you get one. They contain full schematics for the car. Ask your local mechanic; they'll show you a shelf of them.
Whereever did you get the idea that cars are "closed" or that it would take something special for the government to get shop manuals? Government fleets order the shop manuals as a matter of course. Nobody would ever consider doing otherwise.
The same thing would be a VERY good idea for computer hardware. It's not at all unusual for circuitry to contain undocumented sections that can be enabled or disabled in some subtle manner that's only documented in the diagrams.
IBM is notorious for this, and I've personally seen it in all sorts of equipment from many vendors. Usually it's an innocent omission, or something that is only used for hardware diagnostics. But sometimes real functionality can be and is masked this way.
If you don't believe this, you are incredibly innocent and naive.
I would personally be very surprised if the proprietary voting equipment being used in Florida didn't have such hidden capabilities that can only be discovered by examining the circuit diagrams. This is VOTING hardware, folks. Biasing the results can determine the election. If you trust them, you might as well not bother voting.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
... because the RTF Spec is published by ... (wait for it) ... Microsoft! There is a new "revision" of the spec for each new version of Word, and subsequent versions of the spec include new tags for old functions and depreciate old tags.
The current spec (1.8 I beleieve) does address embeded images and OLE objects, but not macros.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Unusual to see a Bruce Perens post only moderated at 3 ;)
1 6e con-b.asp
f m?Reco rdID=130
o .cfm?Reco rdID=130
a \M icrosoft\Word\AutoRecoverysaveofMaccriskenletterre SFGate
Unless it has been changed already (it does not seem to have been) the names mentioned are
Peter Passell
Bernard Reddy
Michael Wendy
google Bernard Reddy and you will find this hilarious article titled why does microsoft charge so little!
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/doj/econ/10-
Peter Passel might be this guy:
http://www.milkeninstitute.org/gc2002/bio.c
below that agian it says
T o t h e E d i t o r :
P e t e r P a s s e l l
M i c h a e l W e n d y
I wonder if this is the same Peter Passel?
http://www.milkeninstitute.org/gc2002/bi
Microsoft Autosave, ha ha ha!
this minus spaces was what was inserted at the bottom of the document, these were obviously some of the people who helped review the Document.
C:\DocumentsandSettings\username\ApplicationDat
It seems they used Ms Word 9.
While i am at it, Mr Perens when will you be in Denmark? (I read the recent article at Newsforge and would like to know, the month would be detail enough).
I NEVER said OpenGL == DirectX. I merely said that OpenGL is an alternative to DirectX, and is more portable. OpenGL is open, while DirectX is a Microsoft-created "standard" (according to them.) OpenGL is portable across Linux, Windows, and other operating systems, while DirectX is Windows only. Please read my posts more carefully before flaming me.
/usr/games/fortune
No, you said "OpenGL is at least as powerful as DirectX" which is apples and oranges. It's also false since DirectX is the more featureful one.
I merely said that OpenGL is an alternative to DirectX, and is more portable.
You're doing it again. Please stop.
Alright, let me hit you with the clue stick: THEY ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. It's like saying "TCP/IP is a replacement for Window's network device driver API".
OpenGL is a 3D rendering library. Direct3D is a 3D rendering library. DirectX is a FRAMEBUFFER LIBRARY, closer to XFree86 (although not identical).
Once again: OpenGL under Windows *USES* DirectX.
I hate to break it to you, but Torvalds is not God, and his word is not gospel.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
I think this must be a Gecko bug, because it gets it wrong but as soon as I start to resize the window it repositions it correctly. (This is Mozilla 1.1 in Win2k, at least.)
From tinkering a bit, the problem appears to be when there's not enough text on the page to fill the entire browser window. If there's a vertical scroll bar the menu works, otherwise the it breaks.
someone was listening!
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.