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IT, Be Free!
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Group, along with IBM, has published a 500-word document that it hopes developers will endorse. The 'Developer Declaration of Independence' enjoins corporations, governments, organizations, and individuals to adopt and protect open standards in order to promote interoperability among all vendors and give IT customers freedom of choice. The Boston-based Open Group promotes the POSIX open standard and sells compliance testing to OS vendors. It has not yet organized a 'Boston IT Party,' however."
I really don't see the point in this. If you want to support open standards (as you should) then simply.... use open standards. We all know it. This isn't telling us anything we don't know already. People who aren't using them aren't checking out the OpenGroup's web site. This "Developer Declaration of Independence" is just another fluffy mission statement. Yeah it sounds great, but is it actually going to DO anything to help the problem?
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
POSIX really represents everything that's wrong with the computer industry. No vendor really wants to implement a standard, they only do so grudgingly to apease customers. That's why standards implementation has always been quite poor.
POSIX itself has been made largely irrelevant by the sucess of Linux. Standards orgainisations should learn from this - the world doesn't want standards that vendors can implement more or less correctly to provide a veneer of compatability. What the world wants is a free reference implementation that works and which other implemetations if they need to exist at all, can be compared to.
If vendors want to waste money funding organisations like the Open Group that's their problem, but organisations like the Open Group shouldn't expect anyone to really care about the useless documents they create.
They hold thousands of patents, and don't think twice about using them to crush competition
That's hardly a fault with IBM, rather than a fault with the patent system. If the law allows it, and you have tons of attorneys and patent people, you patent everything you can. They can prove to be useful for crushing competitors at some point, or defending yourself agains patent attacks. It's quite basic logic, in fact.
Abolishing the SW patent laws needs to happen at government level. I've said this before, but we need an all-out hostile patent lawsuit that is so ridiculous and hurts the industry so much that any idiot can see the damage, rather than this slow suffocating effect of just hindering potential growth and improvements in the state of technology. Nobody sees if progress doesn't happen, but everybody sees direct damage and can draw the conclusions.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
They don't say "open source" anywhere in the declaration. They're talking about open standards. Arguably open standards are more important than open source. An open source product can splinter and produce two competing incompatible products, even though they are both open source. It takes a lot of effort to reconcile the splinter and sadly there is a lot of "heated" discussion involved in the reconciliation.
But open standards are the ultimate arbitrator; a product either is or is not compliant with the standard. There are no arguments over who is right and who is wrong. The arguments were all over and done with once the standard was written. Agreed, sometimes standards are imperfect so there can be different interpretations, but standards are the strongest mechanism we have for coordinating many vendors to produce compatible products.
Be aware that even in the open source world we have attempts at our own open standards (eg, LSB) and we have implementations of many open standards (eg, POSIX, X11, C#, LDAP). The marriage of open source and open standards is a formidable pairing. Far stronger than either element alone.
We can safely assume that there will always be vendors who follow open standards but do not release open source. We can still work with those vendors. We do so every day when we network a Linux server with Cisco routers. Those vendors are still our friends. We can also work with vendors who write open source software but don't follow any open standards. They are also our friends, though IMO they are painful vendors to work with. And there will be some vendors who write open source and follow open standards. Those vendors are a dream come true.
But be wary of vendors who don't release open source and don't follow open standards. There be dragons.
Open standards can exist in a completely proprietary environment. Open standards should, however, ensure interoperability. In that regard, open standards should be a legal requirement. Vendor lockin should be considered to be restraint of trade.
I also wonder if this declaration could be viewed as anti-DMCA? That would be radical.
Anyway, when I went to the document, the counter was only at 916 so we're not exactly slashdotting them. Maybe that is some indication of how interested the community is.
It does. Towards the end it reads:
The document is available online , along with a form that can be used to "sign" it.
2> The declaration stinks of pointy haired people sitting in afternoon long meetings. Not sure if I disagree here. Its form reminds me of these stuffy CEPT resolutions I have seen quoted in the old Radio Amateurs Handbook. On the other hand, there are only so many ways such a declaration could be formatted. And isn't the content rather more important, than the form being a literary masterpiece? Besides, the audience may include said PHBs.
3>. IBM now is not the same as IBM was 25 years ago. They probably sees this as relevant to their future business opportunities. They indicate as much, at any rate. And as they are more concerned with selling hardware and services; if they can profit from open standards then they will support that.
Which does raise the question of how much more than an IBM PR thing this really is.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Is the need for open standards or open source "self evident"? To anybody in their mid-forties, or older, who studied any of the sciences, or anybody that studied the history of science, the answer is "yes".
Almost all of the technology that we love was developed in an environment of free exchange of ideas. Individuals laboured in isolation or small groups and freely published their ideas and discoveries for others to adopt, adapt, or criticize.
Derivative works made useful products - the production of which might be closed, secret or protected by laws. It was not until the early 1980s that it became common practice for basic researchers to turn to patents and secrets to protect or withhold their ideas from their colleagues and the world at large.
For example: where would we be with computer displays if the painter George Seurat (1859-91) had been able to say to the world: "No, no, no. It is only I that may make images by the laying of pure primary colors in minute dots upon a white background. The pointillism image that you produced is therefore my image and you and all those who have viewed it owe me $699 each".
Oh my. . . This just mutated into a SCO rant. Mod me down.
Linux isn't technically unix, but it's unix enough for anything that matters.
It's posix compliant in enough. Can you name some posix feature that is missing that anyone cares about? Which parts of posix are you referring to?
Sales figures would disagree with your comments about Sun hardware. Sun was not on top in some sectors because of posix compliance, nor the fact that they can use the unix trademark.
Sun is in the process of losing it's high end oracle market right now, and oracle is moving customers to intel/linux clusters instead of 64 processor sun servers.
I can assure you that those other "Real" unixes are not chosen because they are "Real" but because they have large corporate backing.
Remember, SCO Unixware is real unix.. and it's crap.
All of my code at work is written to POSIX and other ANSI/ISO standards (C, C++), exactly for the reason that it produces portable code. This allows us to be vendor neutral when it comes to choosing hardware. We've been able to move our code to new POSIX compliant systems, often only needing to make changes due to things like big-endian/little-endian or compiler/library bug work arounds.
The vendors typically are good about fixing standards conformance problems, especially when I say I'll just have to buy another vendor's hardware. Don't underestimate the power of open standards!
On the other hand, you are correct in saying C# is not of much use without the rest of .NET...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
If you're going to claim that there are facts that don't support the conclusion, it would be helpful if you actually stated the conclusion and the facts that don't support it.
!!!
And what does that have to do with anything?