International Call for Open Standards

tengu1sd writes "The New York Times is carrying a report urging nations to adopt open-information technology standards as 'a vital step to accelerate economic growth, efficiency and innovation'. Sponsored by The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, it also points out that 'open technology standards - the digital equivalent of a common gauge for railroad tracks - are not the same thing as open-source software. Open source is a development model for software in which code is freely shared and improved by a cooperative network of programmers'. This leaves room for companies willing to accept standards, but closes the door to companies unwilling to play nice."

Comments

closed standards

[lanswitch]

Open standards have been the driving force behind the development of the PC. The only reason for closed standards is so that somebody can make money with them.

Magic vs. Science

[Rob Carr]

Before science became accepted, people we would now call magicians and alchemists actually made scientific progress. Unfortunately, their secrets were closely guarded and not always passed down. What someone learned by trial and error was lost to the regular community.

The big change that permitted science to flourish was the willingness to share information. Because the information was shared, progress was not limited to what one person could create.

The failure to use Open Standards won't send us back to the dark ages. But it will slow progress down as each proprietary standard sets up a roadblock.

The failure to follow standards should be punished in some way. Using basic economics isn't fast, but it will work in the long run.

Re:Standards just wont happen

[cyborg_zx]

But standards *do* happen. There are just too many areas in life that would become totally inoperable if everyone did things differently. Like driving for example. But then having a standard doesn't necessarially mean 'everyone is uniform' - in this context it usually just means everyone can understand the interface or specification for your standard without needing the use of dowsing, divine revelation, mediums or perhaps reverse engineering to work with that interface of specification.

This isn't about OSS

[110010001000]

The point is that Open STANDARDS are important - not Open Source. All this fuss over OSS is ridiculous. What should remain is the idea that open standards provide the opportunity for growth in the industry. The actual implementation of the software is much less important.

Open standards and Open Source have nothing to do with each other. There is plenty of closed source software that supports open standards.

Re:Play nice?

[gclef]

If standard-compliant documents become a requirement for large purchases, it doesn't matter if the company wants to play nice or not...the only question is: do they want the sale? Customers can force the companies to play nice by making standards-compliant document formats a requirement.

Re:Open standards and competition

[discordja]

You've completely missed the point. You seem to equate product with proprietary implementation of data storage. In the perfect world, open standards are conformed to and what is *actually* sold is the interface, the method of getting to and manipulating that data. If MS could keep it's monopoly in that scenario, it would be because they actually created the best product instead of holding your data hostage, threatening that if you move away from them you'll never be able to see your files again.