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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."
During the last airline IT fiasco it struck me that the airline industry would benefit from some open platforms and standards. While the current diversity keeps everyone from crashing at the same time, it also leads to a lot of waste as everyone has to design their own thing. Seems like they could pool their money and hire a dev team to build an open source project. That'd give them a better chance of finding someone who knows how to fix it when it breaks, among other things.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There was an article a year ago - the Indian President inaugurating the Indian Institute of Information Technology.. and in his address, he asked for firms and govts. to stay away from proprietary standards, software and formats. He'd even mentioned his 'discussions with Bill Gates turned difficult' when Gates visited him. Incidentally, this was a short while after Richard Stallman visited the Indian President.
Methinks after Massachusets, very slowly people in the 'First World' are waking up to this fact.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
Not really, the big change came mainly out of stealing information & ignoring patents (The last one because of differences in laws between countries and some wars). Those two inspired more companies to license their inventions to others so that they at least would earn some money, and set a minimum productprice which due to the license was hopefully equal or higher to what they sold themselves.
I think reforms in the educational system of basic science (Darwin, math, economics) made the changes possible. At this moment there are still limits on information causing lots of reinventions just to get were a company or country wants to go, for example nuclear technology.
So far the economics of closed standards worked pretty good, but only for companies which license their standards to others. The ones who did not and became to powerful, have been hit by lawsuits (IBM, Microsoft ea). Still those are the ones who set industry standards with their closed products. Licensing it in a more fair way would most likely have prevented the MS lawsuits, while they could (they still can at this moment) control the standards, and stay ahead of the curve.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
The ARPA internet suite was not then recognised as a standard because no accepted international standards body (essentially ISO or CCITT) had published the standards. Eventually some of us* managed to convince the Joint Network Team of the Computer Board that TCP/IP would do what was required and the "coloured book" standards wouldn't and then within 2 years almost all the universities were in line with the rest of the world. (and we could get networking standard that didn't have to be custom written for the UK).
* Some claim that it was a document that I wrote for our JNT contact that finally forced the change.
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. Absolutely. I've always thought that there's too much talk about open source, and not enough talk about open standards. Some governments, like the swedish, have already adopted a policy where all government information will be accessible through open standard formats. This guarantees that nobody needs to buy a certain platform in order to be able to get official information. In my oppinion this is much more important for free competition, and freedom to chose your own solutions, that open source will ever be.
Why force the standards when these can evolve over a period of time out of the need. If those are't, we won't have needed them in the first place.
I know I am going against popular opinion here at
95% of all sigs are made up.
Is that why 60% of all web servers use Apache?
Is that why 100% of web servers use HTML.
Open Standards are the only thing binding us together. Every time some one tries to captialize on a small but growing market segment that segment eventually folds, and then new open standards are developed.
It takes time, but gradually over time we have become a a very open society compared to the past. It's also what is responsible for the sudden growth in technology in the past Century.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
From a purely technical standpoint, open standards seem quite attractive. However, until the patent system gets reworked so software patents get invalidated or have a high level of specificity required in comparing claims, even 'open' standards can become proprietary in a legal sense.
Some 'licensing' companies (e.g. Via Licensing and MPEG LA) will, if a standard looks like it will get some significant use in the market, make a 'call for patents', which means they ask anyone with a patent who thinks their patent would have some 'essentiality' to any implementation that used the standard to submit their patent for review. If one of these 'licensing' companies thinks the patent would apply generally to any system or application implementation that would make use of the standard, they add that patent with others of like merits to a 'patent pool' and then go after anyone using the standard to demand license fees for the pool. In this fashion, any open standard becomes a candidate for such companies to essentially leech off the standard and thereby prevent open, as in fee-less, use of the standard.
Open standards, then, face two hurdles beyond the technical ones. First, the well-known business interest some companies have in keeping their formats proprietary so you will not stop using their systems or software. Second, the less well-known, but growing legal problems with those who want to profit from the patent system without adding any real value in terms of standard creation or implementations. Open standards remain a good technical goal and we should pursue them, but this underscores some of the challenges to keep in mind.
Open standards are easy, even if everyone wants to do it their own way. All you have to do is mandate that communication file formats not be locked down, and you have to accept the fact that the 800 lb gorilla gets to win.
.doc. It is effectively an open standard.
Open Office was perfectly free to make their own document format, but everyone know the standard is the Word 2000 format. Since the word 2000 format isn't encumbered by copyright or patent, every other companie that does word processing has found a way to output to
Compare and contrast with AOL instant messenger. They didn't lock it with IP, but they locked that shit down tight through other methods. No one was able to use it so now my company has to deal with IM hell. They didn't have to publish their standard, or go through 18 different levels of beurocracy to get it approved, all they had to do was let other people talk to their servers and clients and their method would have been a defacto standard.
Standards are easy, as long as everyone is free to impliment the proprietary formats of everyone else. Markets get to set them and enforce them, but everyone gets to bennefit from them.
TW
Oh yes, I know, that's blasphemy and my karma is now lower than Lucifer's, but if you stop and think for a moment you'll realize that it's the logical and realistic choice.
Then your logic must be flawed. You know MS won't ever release full specs for any of its formats, it could be licensed to big clients (just like their Shared Source program) but NEVER there will be a 100% compliant free implementation. So I fail to see how it could be a standard, the definition you give from the dictionnary is the MAINSTREAM definition and certainly not the one recognized in science or more precisely in the technics (more as in "normalization").
The logical choice is of course OASIS, which has already been recognized as the official document standard in most of European countries, and was compared technically, practically and logically to MS doc by a commission (with people who decided for technical reasons that OASIS was better in most points and rejected MS's bribe yeah).
Still, I don't know how it has evolved, but I remember last february when their was a call for boycott from the FSF against the OASIS Group, regarding their policy towards sw patents. I hope they have/will fix(ed) that but they can't be worse than MS regarding patent abuse or bad patenting policy.
Though I don't find MS fanboys that irritating anymore (it's more that I don't care about MS anymore now that they have a very low impact on my computing life), I don't understand how people can still support them and consider that just because they're the bigger software company they must remain so. And forget excellence.
We have a few standards now. TCP/IP is the Protocol for going on the internet for everyone. But it's not the only one because at times it's restrictive to some programs.
Mp3s have become the standard because of increased compression, but it also loses some quality in some people's minds but for the most part almost everyone can use them.
The problem with these standards is they were lucky. How many formats have been moved out of the way for Mp3s? (wav, ogg, aac just to name a couple) How many Movie Formats have come out after AVI? (ASF, WMV, OGG, MKV, and others)
See the problem is this. How do we establish a standard? The fact is standards are adopted, not created. It's great that you want to standardize the interoperability of goverments or coporations, but if the standards arn't up to snuff the standards arn't worth the time it takes to think about it.
The problem is thus, we need standards but open source standards arn't always as efficent, or even work. Standards NEED to be made by how useful the program or the protocol is, not how cheap it is to get. It's great to try to use them when we can, but there's some areas where it's not ready for prime time.
And then there's the other problem open standards tell everyone who wants to know how it works, this is a double edged sword. It's great everyone can link up with it, but someone who wants to create trouble can read it and figure out a way to get into the system itself.
I'm sorta glad we don't have certain groups relying on open formats for this reason. The groups that protect our finances, and our country. But the fact is that I've yet to see a national industry go and use only Open Source options and continue to thrive, and there's obviously reasons for that.
As many a politician has said America is a "leader in [enter topic of discussoin]". Why don't we start the charge and maybe open up the FEMA site to other browsers.
I know this is not exactly what this program is calling for but how do we expect other countries to follow our lead (this is an American University making the call) when we don't even open up our own doors to "standards"
There is only "what's popular". Office file formats aren't a standard, but people view them that way because they are the most popular file formats being used. Similarly, companies call their thing a standard in an attempt to get it popular enough so that everyone will use it, which equals more money.
Call something some way enough times, and you can convince people that it's so. Really, the whole idea of something being a "standard" is basically a fear tactic to say "if you don't use our stuff you won't get any customers, because everyone uses our stuff." Most people can be manipulated by that sort of thinking, which pushes home the idea of something being a standard.
If you accept that "standard" = "popular", then it becomes pretty clear that organizations that attempt to get people to use "standards" are completely going about it the wrong way. Look: certain things (file formats, products, etc.) are popular. They just are. Mindshare exists, and it's set up in a certain way, and you can't change it. At least not without wasting a whole lot of unnecessary effort trying.
The point is, if you waste all your time trying to fight what is, then you will get nowhere. This is what you do. You take what is (i.e. microsoft's popular file formats), and reverse-engineer them so that everyone can use it. You open up something that's ALREADY popular and call it a standard and work from there. That's the only way that actually makes some sense, and has the possiblity to work.
You simply AREN'T going to suddenly change everyone's mind as to what they like to use in your attempt to drive home a new standard. Sorry, but it's not going to happen. People use what they like to use, not "the best" or based upon who developed it, where it came from, how clean the code is, what monkey's it saves, etc. So in other words, the standard you create has to be something that's ALREADY popular, and NOT something some organization likes based upon it's technical merit over something else. Trying to make some new thing a standard without first making sure it is popular with people is not only stupid, it's damn near impossible.
Not using something that's already popular is the SOLE reason why "standards" hardly ever get off the ground. A standard is not a standard because some consortium weenies declare it to be, it's a standard when people actually use it (i.e. it's popular.)
It all falls apart in the second clause of your second sentence:
"especially one driven by the need for short term profits such as ours"
My favorite example is the Internet. Go back into the 80's, and we had TheSource, GEnie, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc, all vying to be THE online provider. They were ALL trying to own the whole pie.
Yet that very act of attempting exclusive ownership is what made each of those pies rather small. Then the Internet came along, the pie that couldn't be owned, and it GREW. The only one of those early ISPs that's still around in any significant way is AOL, the one who did the best job of embracing the idea of owning it's piece of a much bigger pie.
Even after that example, American business didn't learn. I swear that they all look at the big pie called the Internet, and say, "I want to OWN that pie," and just can't realize that non-ownership is an essential property. Witness instant messaging, streaming media, or any other Internet add-on.
So perhaps you're right, and Utopian ideals of open standards just won't happen in today's society. In that case NOTHING big will happen, we'll just have a collection of little pies.
Microsoft's ownership of the PC OS is/was an aberration, and they're trying like all get-out to extend that aberration into everything they can get their hands on. But it's still an aberration, a refusal to allow THEIR products to become commodities, while driving everything surrounding them in that direction.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.