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."

Comments

Open standards

[bytesmythe]

The issue of open standards is one that keeps coming to the forefront of any discussion regarding making both commercial AND open source software viable choices in the software arena. I see a lot of people saying "It will never happen." If all you do is keep saying that, you're right. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If anyone has any ideas about what we can do to promote "Sincere Choice", please let me know. Complaining in Slashdot is not much of a start, especially if this is as far as it goes. So, to help get started, here are a few ideas for everyone to try:

• Try out different open source packages for various applications. Run through them and find bugs. Check the project's website and report those bugs.
• If you're proficient at programming, contribute code to an open source project.
• Encourage people to run other OSes. For the non-techies, try Lycoris or Elx.
• Find out which congresspersons are sympathetic to this issue and write to them. Find out which one's aren't and write to them, too. Find out which one's are on the fence and write to them as well.
• Contribute money, time, or both to some organization like the EFF, CDT, GNU/FSF, or by purchasing or donating to your favorite open source application and/or linux distro.
• If you are in a tech position at a company or government agency, point out the benefits of going to an open source platform for your organization.
• Put plugs on your personal websites.
• Actively boycott companies who violate these principals. (Note: This does NOT mean companies who sell software. This means companies who try to monopolize the market [Microsoft] or support the DMCA [Adobe].)
• Don't let the bastards wear you down.

Any other ideas?

You've never

[Monkelectric]

You've obviously never written a large proposal (200+ pages) or a videogame :)

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).

Re:Something I'd love to see...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

Mr. Economist doesn't buy it

[0x0d0a]

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.

I need a bit of help.

[Bruce Perens]

Please download that microsoft word file and hold on to it folks. I need you as witnesses that the hidden text in the file really was on the site. Do this before they remove or fix the file.

Run "strings" on the file. It's at the end. A few people's names.

Bruce