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Using Closed Standards To Pay For Open Ones
An anonymous reader points to a story at NewsForge, writing "EGOVOS analyzes the recently passed South African OSS plan and proposes a great way to fund Open Source education and development until companies comply with open standards. Microsoft pays a 10% penalty until their products comply with open standards. That would be billions of dollars to Open Source to compensate for an unlevel playing field until it is leveled. All the policy guidelines for governments are worth reading. This looks like a workable plan from a credible group." Reader johndiii clarifies: "From what I have been able to see, the strategy document is 'proposed,'
not 'recently passed,' and is not yet official policy of the South
African government."
They said nothing about the source.. unless I missed that part.. They want the standards opened up. The OSS peoples still have to code their own stuff, but they atleast have standards to code by then.
Can all fish swim?
I think that the way that Transgaming and Codeweavers (Winex and Crossover respectively) manage revenue collection / open source application source generation is very intelligent. For a small fee, you get their 'enhanced' version of an open source program (wine), for which they get paid. In return, both companies contribute to the source of the main project with well bug-tested code. It may be a rev or two behind their 'pay' applications, but it allows the project to make great leaps and bounds being funded totally by commercial use.
Personally - I have purchaced both and use them extensively to get to everything from Office 2000 to Diablo II working on my Linux boxes at home and work. I like that with Winex, I purchace a 'subscription' for $5 a month, which I can discontinue at any time, which only cuts me off from updating my binary.
If Microsoft was willing to publish 'old' API suites for free (even ones for Windows 9x), it would be a step in the right direction. It would give the communities of Windows Application Developers a stand on the playing field for begining to develop stable applications in the new (XP / Windows 2003 Server) environment.
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"2. The software industry as a whole would suffer. Open standards are nice for interoperability, but not so nice for new development."
There's a time and place for new ideas in software. It's called research and experimentation. Production data and especially public records in government should most definitely be stored in documented, standards-compliant file formats. To see why this is a good idea, see the Dead Media Project. How many of your 20 year old computer files could you retrieve? Got an Apple II Appleworks filter for your office suite?
Even with this law, MS might say "we comply because the Office 2003 file format is XML", but won't do you much good if the namespace and schema are locked up.
It's not obvious? If I tell the world how my word processing file format works, then someone else is free to come along and write a BETTER word processor that's 100% compatible with mine.
Right.
I am a consumer. Do I buy your's, where I am pretty well guaranteed I will never be able to get that BETTER word processor that's 100% compatible with your's?
Or do I buy an inferior word processor where I'm pretty well guaranteed that there will be BETTER and 100% compatible alternatives in the future?
Further, if you die, go out of business, or just lose interest, I'm SOL.
Sure you can modify it. Simply issue a new version of your file format specification.
File formats can also be designed for extensibility, by making the specification modular. So then you can sometimes simply publish a new specification module.
It's the same principle behind "private" fields in Java.
Not really. Private fields are for stuff that users of a library shouldn't rely on because it might change or go away in future. With a file format, you can of course provide a library to abstract away implementation details, which is useful for avoiding costly code rewrites. But users of that file format shouldn't be forced to use your library - they should be able to write their own, in whatever language and on whatever platform they choose.
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