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

Microsoft-founded Institute for Software Choice?

[porky_pig_jr]

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.

Let's see how their websites validate

[goingware]

Because the W3C HTML Validator uses the GET method for its form submission, I can post hyperlinks that will run the validator on each of their webpages.

• 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.

Choice Through Interoperability?

[ThreeToe]

One of Sincere Choice's principals is Choice Through Interoperability. At first, the idea that "competing products should interoperate with each other through open standards" may appear completely sensible. Interoperability can be (and has been) used as a strike against Microsoft, king of embrace-and-extend.

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:

1. To differentiate their product, corporations must add new features; new features very often impose new requirements on persistence format and hence break interoperability.
2. 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?

Re:Choice Through Interoperability?

[Todd Knarr]

The first objection would be false. A company can readily add things to the persistence format, as long as they document them so other software can interoperate with them. Whether that other software then chooses to recognize the new items is up to it.

Note that standards can be designed to be open-ended. For example, the standard could explicitly include a way of adding vendor-specific tags to an XML-based format. Any vendor could adhere to the standard by making their vendor-specific tags conform to the standard's rules, and qualify as "Sincere Choice" by documenting their vendor-specific stuff so others can read what they write and write things they can read.

And yes, this can be done. I do it every day in my job. You'd be suprised how much you can get away with ignoring, too. I can ignore, for example, 99% of the stuff in an MSWord document, apply a simple line-wrapping rule, and get readable results. Not pretty, but readable. In some cases more readable than the original, in fact.

CompTIA responds

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

Names and emails changed to protect the innocent:

From: xxx@comptia.org
To: xxx@xxx.com
Subject: Software Choice

Thanks for the suggestion,

x.,

Pretty fast turnaround on response, but I would have appreciated, oh, a "yes" or "no" or "we'll think about it"!

Written in conjunction with Junk Bond King

[Dr. Zowie]

Interestingly enough, the M$ word rebuttal on the ISC site contains some strings that the author probably didn't intend to publish. In particular, the name of Peter Passell, archconservative economist, and the name "Milken Institute" -- home of the Junk Bond King himself -- who did time in federal prison for his own shady business practices in the 1980s.

If only he were using an open-source format for his letters....

Re:Written in conjunction with Junk Bond King

[cscx]

Two things:

1) Someone was stupid enough to leave "Allow fast saves" turned on -- it just appends edits to the file to save time on large documents. It does hell for document security though.

2) Someone else was smart enough to run % strings Maccrisken.Letter.doc and post it to Slashdot ;-)

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

[BlowCat]

I like Office. Sure, it's bloated, but it works pretty damn well for most people.

It works "pretty damn well for most people" in your country with its laws and its average income.

If you take a country where copyright laws are enforced, but the income is low (think e.g. Eastern Europe), the whole picture is very different.

RTF *not* compatible!

[aquarian]

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.