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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."
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
Any other ideas?
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Jut to point out how what you're saying relates to Perens' article, not to agree or disagree... Office was written with unnecessarily proprietary binary file formats. They could have gone the OpenOffice.org route and published file formats which could be shared by others. (Some would argue they did by allowing some others to license the binary format, but I don't call that being open.) DirectX was a direct response to OpenGL, which literally is an open standard. Instead of going with what was (maybe) the only all-inclusive open API, they created their own. These are the things Perens is arguing against.
Developers: We can use your help.
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
The GNU/HURD system sounds alot like QNX and is very interesting technology. You just dont understand. =)
GNU/HURD
Pixels keep you awake!
It's worse than that. MS didn't even create DirectX -- they purchased Rendermorphics in 1997 to acquire the technology that developed into DirectX. The entire motivating reason behind the purchase was because they were running out of time for the release of Windows 95, and they were determined to kill off OpenGL on the Windows platform by using Windows 95 as a leveraging tool.
You should recall that Windows 95 did not originally contain OpenGL support, even though Windows NT did. They only added support later because application vendors started complaining that there was no reason for it not to be supported.
So, they bought Rendermorphics and released its 3D API as Direct3D, rather than cooperate with the OpenGL consortium (as that would have meant playing on a level field with the rest of the industry).
Read all about the early 3D API wars here, and why Microsoft really is the anti-competitive player in this situation, regardless of how some try to spin it:
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/3d.html
No, it isn't. (And if you'll excuse my saying so, you're letting your prejudice show...)
PDF-format files are stored in an open format. You can get a viewer for PDF-format files for just about any hardware and operating system ever invented, and if there isn't one available for the hardware and operating system you want to read it on, you can create your own. You don't even need Adobe's permission to create it.
More to the point, you could create a reader for a computer and operating system invented tomorrow, even if Adobe were to cease to exist today. Even if the resulting viewer resulted in a negative impact to Adobe's profits (if, for example, it served a market they would otherwise profit by serving).
Compare to the collection of Microsoft Office Document Readers available from the web site you cite. Those are provided by Microsoft only for the operating systems they choose, and only supported to the extent they deem necessary. I couldn't locate any which were for an operating system other than MacOS or 16/32bit Windows, are there any? Unless Microsoft finds it profitable to invest the time and resources into supporting a hardware/OS you wish to use, it will not be supported. This also presupposes that Microsoft remains able to offer such support; a sudden Enron-style bankrupcy could kill support for even the profitable ones.
Basic communication tenets stipulate that both sides negotiate communication parameters to the greatest common denominator. Since the open PDF format can be supported on any platform, and Microsoft's format cannot, then a sender who does not otherwise know the receivers capabilities should assume the PDF is more acceptable than the alternative you suggest.
Not everyone runs on x86 (or even PPC). Even those who do are not always running a Microsoft (or other supported) operating system. You seem to be under the impression that Windows is the only thing which matters?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
You're out-of-date. kword does support RTF in KOffice 1.2
can't embed them into XML
Uh, ok. You can link to them, which is just as well. What you describe is OLE, which the poster already addressed.
Postscript or PDF are obvious choices if you want to have a document with images embedded. They are actually open standards too.
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
Run "strings" on the file. It's at the end. A few people's names.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.