Why Open Standards Matter

Tina Gasperson over at Newsforge (Also owned by VA Software) has an interesting writeup about her experience at the Government Day sub-conference at LinuxWorld Boston. Government Day addressed some interesting issues including some of the more tangible reasons behind supporting open standards. From the article: "Speaking to the audience of government workers, Villa said, 'Maybe 2006 is not the year that Linux ends up on your desktops.' But, he encouraged them, if they begin using software that supports open standards now, such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org, then when Linux is ready it will be that much easier to make a switch. 'And maybe you'll decide not to make that switch,' Villa said. 'But at least the choice will be yours.'"

Comments

About Open standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Although open source software is technically free, many companies sell a distribution version of an open source operating system or application for a fee. The distribution combines the free source code along with proprietary development utilities and a technical support package. For example, the Linux operating system, the most widely known open source project, is available from several vendors for a fee.

Although most all operating environments have open source projects, open source is particularly common in the Unix/Linux/Java world; for example, the Apache Web server, sendmail mail server and JBoss application server. The Netscape Web browser was also turned into open source in 1998 and later released as the Mozilla browser for Windows, Linux and Mac (see Mozilla).

Peer Review

Open source developers claim that a broad group of programmers produces a more useful and more bug-free product. The primary reason is that more people are constantly reviewing the code. This "peer review," where another programmer examines the code of the original programmer, is a natural byproduct of open source. Peer review is an important safeguard against poorly written code.

Vendors of proprietary software counter by saying that "too many cooks spoil the broth!" They say that having complete control over software ultimately results in better products.

flist

Re:About Open standards

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. A post titled "About Open standards" that talks solely about open source gets moded insightful. Even when it only says trivial things. -1 Offtopic is more like it. And while we're at it:

Although open source software is technically free, many companies sell a distribution version of an open source operating system or application for a fee. The distribution combines the free source code along with proprietary development utilities and a technical support package. For example, the Linux operating system, the most widely known open source project, is available from several vendors for a fee.

The poster completely looks over the new business opportunities that form in OSS support. Even local businesses can do what 'the big guys' are doing, thus avoiding wealth being accumulated by one corporate entity. CentOS is a good example of this. OK, bye bye now...

Re:About Open standards

[advocate_one]

erm... we're talking about Open Standards here, NOT Open Source Software... if your software, (whether OSS or CSS) supports Open Standards, then your data cannot be locked in.

If the standard is Closed (ie proprietary), then the owner of the standard can change it and you are stuffed unless you stick with the software provided by the owner of the standard... this, of course, leaves you open to your data being held hostage subject to you remaining on the upgrade treadmill...

if you are using Open Standards and the supplier of your closed source software software goes belly up, then your data isn't held hostage or lost because someone else is highly likely to already support that same Open Standard

Re:About Open standards

[onebecoming]

Thanks, peabrain. Maybe next time you'll want to excise the subhead before your copy-paste hackjob.

Re:About Open standards

[linuxfanatic1024]

What is your problem? This post was actually on-topic, even though it was by an AC.

Getting the point across

[bloobloo]

If you want to describe the importance to a non-techie audience, the best idea is to use the simile of describing closed formats like betamax. Although it had its advantages there are problems getting the information back out. Yet "open standards" such as cine film can still be viewed or transcribed more easily. The closest people can usually get to understanding in terms of computer programs are the problems in moving from Access 98 to 2000.

Re:Getting the point across

[MichaelSmith]

If you want to describe the importance to a non-techie audience, the best idea is to use the simile of describing closed formats like betamax

Imagine if you had to go to the maker of your car for servicing no matter how old it gets, and independent mechanics could not exist.

Re:Getting the point across

[arendjr]

A very good illustration was made by David Wheeler at LinuxWorld about the importance of open standards, and it's probably even easier to understand for non-techies:

[...] He went on to show the audience, through another word picture describing a 1904 fire in Baltimore, how open standards can prevent unhealthy dependence on one vendor. "Firefighters were called in from all the surrounding states," Wheeler said. "But all they could do was stand and watch the building burn, because their firehoses would not fit on the fire hydrants." A standard fire hose coupler could have prevented much of the destruction. [...]

Re:Getting the point across

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be related to BadAnalogyGuy.

I think most people are sufficiently non-technical that they wouldn't understand the issues with getting video off Betamax. The appropriate comparison is Betamax against VHS, not Betamax against film. People would not understand why it's easier and better to support VHS (if indeed that is the case, it's certainly not clear to me). Film, on the other hand, is a completely different technology.

MP3 vs OGG ... MP3 is a closed standard; if you use it you have to have a license from Fraunhofer, else they can sue you for it. Nobody can sue you for using OGG.

DOC vs ODF ... DOC is a secret proprietary standard which Microsoft tries hard to break in every new release of Word to keep you on an upgrade treadmill. If you don't use a Microsoft product then you can't use DOC files correctly (and often also even when you do use a Microsoft product).

I think it's not hard for non-technical people to understand lock-in. If you use DOC you get locked-in to Microsoft. Windows tends to lock you in to other technologies which are Windows-only. It's a slippery slope.

Re:Getting the point across

[houghi]

While DSL is fine for the regular hacker, I dont know if a 10 year old will be confortable with it...

OK, I asume you are refering how Betamax was better the VHS technically. First they are both closed standards, so no matter who won, the closed standard would win.

There are plenty of closed standards that are accepted. Look at the music CD. I believe it was Philips that collected the benefits for that for a long time. Not sure if they still do.

There is a difference between closed standards that you let nobody else use (like *.doc), closed standards that you control, but let others use (like *.pdf) or open ones that are made by a commity (like *.html)

Naturaly the public must accept these standards and the governement must enforce the use of these standards.(meter, celcius, gram, liter, ...)

Re:Getting the point across

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"If you want to describe the importance to a non-techie audience, the best idea is to use the simile of describing closed formats like betamax. Although it had its advantages there are problems getting the information back out. Yet "open standards" such as cine film can still be viewed or transcribed more easily"

Your heart is in the right place, but this doesn't strike me as a great example just on the grounds that somebody (like me..) would go "huh? Betamax works on all betamax players!" A better example would be one that most people would have dealt with at one time or another. "Have you ever tried to get your check-engine diagnosed outside of your dealer?" Or: "Have you ever tried to use your old cell phone with your new provider?" Okay, admittedly I haven't hit the PERFECT example, but in those cases anybody who has answered yes to those questions would have a lightbulb appear over their heads.

Anyway, this isn't a rebuttal, just a suggestion of a better example. I was a little lost the first time I read your post.

Re:Getting the point across

[bloobloo]

Interestingly, neither of those examples would hold up to scrutiny in the EU. Car manufacturers can't tie you to their main dealers even for their warranty periods as it is restraint of trade. A lot of engine diagnostic systems have been developed through reverse-engineering for interoperability which is legal. Likewise, mobile phones can be used on any network as long as they're unlocked (you may have to pay about £5 for the service) and they haven't been reported stolen.

Re:Getting the point across

[TheRaven64]

You seem to have a different definition of Open Standard to most people I have met. The accepted definition is 'a standard for which the full documentation is available and which can be implemented at no cost'. As such, PDF is an open standard (you can download the specs for the format, and many people do implement it). Flash is not an open standard, since you may download the spec but then only implement tools that write the format, not read it. I'm not completely sure about CDDA - I've used Free software to create and play CDDAs and so neither I nor the software author has paid any royalties. The standard is available under then name 'Red Book'.

Re:Getting the point across

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that there is no Microsoft product called Access98, migration is either easy, or difficult, depending on your PoV:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselectindex#A

Re:Getting the point across

[jyda]

I'd argue that that example does more to illustrate the importance of standards, generally, rather than open standards. But if it's getting the point through, why not?

Re:Getting the point across

[vhogemann]

You really got the point across on this one!

You pasted a snippet from an earlier comment of mine ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182627&cid=150 96646 ) that was attached to a previous non-related post!

=D

Re:Getting the point across

[maxwell demon]

I've used Free software to create and play CDDAs and so neither I nor the software author has paid any royalties.

You might have payed those royalties as part of buying your CD burner and/or your CD-R. I don't know, but I could imagine it.

Re:Getting the point across

[senatorpjt]

There are readers for OBD II (check engine light) that cost less than one visit to have the code read. And, it's an open standard, designed by SAE (society of automotive engineers).

It's actually a requirement by the EPA that the codes CANNOT be read or erased without a tool.

Re:Getting the point across

[Anonymous Coward]

Reverse engineering, although legal, is non-optimal. You may learn enough to support the common usage scenarios but obscure features of the device (for example, some error handling) may be hard or impossible to identify.

I guess that is why some driver support in linux is incomplete with respect to the Windows support, e.g. 802.11g (still hit and miss from what I read), my USB scanner's "scan this" button doesn't do anything, my laptop can't hibernate under linux, the laptop sound doesn't work properly when it is running off battery, and other things. Most of these things were probably reverse-engineered to get where we are at today, and it shows.

IMHO the single biggest reason Linux is not "ready for the desktop" is official hardware support. And I don't mean "there's no driver in the kernel", what I mean is that you go to a computer store, pick up a box and read the System Requirements, and it says "Supports Windows 98, Windows 2000, or Windows XP". Not a mention of Linux. Smart technical folks may know that there's a driver built into the kernel or you can download one off sourceforge - but for the man on the street, if it doesn't say linux on the box then linux is not supported. Why should they use linux if 95% of the hardware and software in the stores does not say "Supports Linux" ? I'm saying that the hardware/software vendor does not support linux, so why should the customer take a chance on it?

Yes, linux comes with an amazing selection of quality Free software, either installed out of the box or downloadable off the net. The man on the street won't see that; what they see is a computer store full of hardware and software which are labeled as "Supports Windows" and almost nothing labeled as "Supports Linux".

Re:Getting the point across

[ajs318]

CDDA was invented in the mid-to-late 1970s; so even if there ever were any patents covering it, they will have expired by now. However, the "COMPACT disc" trademark is still protected; and no licence will be granted for its use on any equipment or discs that do not meet the published standard as amended. Hence this mark is notably absent from certain digital audio discs which deviate from the Red Book specification.

Re:Getting the point across

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Look at the music CD. I believe it was Philips that collected the benefits for that for a long time. Not sure if they still do.

The patent has expired, but they have a trademark on the term "CD." They still refuse to let nonstandard discs use that moniker, like DRM'd pseudo-CDs.

There is a difference between closed standards that you let nobody else use (like *.doc), closed standards that you control, but let others use (like *.pdf) or open ones that are made by a commity (like *.html)

I disagree with your characterization. The "openness" of a standard is not reliant upon who wrote it. It relates only to the functionality. Can it be used by anyone without and strings attached? Also, PDF is an open standard. Anyone can and does implement that standard and Adobe cannot stop them. They released it as an open specification. A better example of a "half-open" standard might be Java. It is a standard and is implemented by many, but the standard is under the control of a single company who has patents on the technology.

Re:Getting the point across

[luge]

No, the point really can be easily and simply driven home (especially to this crowd) by the most obvious example- Microsoft Word. Use .doc, and you get Word; use ODF and you get Open Office, Star Office, IBM's Workplace, Writely, KOffice, Abiword, and even more options- hell, your state or startups in your state can grow your own with no legal trouble whatsoever. And you can choose your operating system and other such as well, again, no problems. People aren't dumb- they don't need to be handheld on this issue. Open standards are pretty close to a no-brainer, thankfully.

Re:Getting the point across

[advocate_one]

Imagine if you had to go to the maker of your car for servicing no matter how old it gets, and independent mechanics could not exist.

Worse, imagine that your car (Car 97), even though perfectly working as far as you're concerned, developes a fault after six years (say it leaks oil everwhere you go) and the garage says that they don't produce parts for those anymore, you have to upgrade to the latest model of Car (Car 2003)...

Re:Getting the point across

[anandsr]

Well what use is a closed standard. A government mandated closed standard is basically giving monopoly to a company in a balatant display of favoritism. It doesn't matter if most people are blind.

Re:Getting the point across

[Atzanteol]

The problem is that most people you're explaining this to are not 'this croud' and *have* Word at work, at home, everywhere. And many of them don't know what 'other operating systems' there are, or don't care that you can't use Word on your crappy lie-nux system. Thus the analogies to more common scenarios and how these issues play out long-term.

Re:Getting the point across

[luge]

The crowd I was explaining it to at LWE was primarily IT people at large governments, and other people with at least some clue. [Realistically, if you can't immediately grok the value of competition, we're in pretty deep trouble to start with, regardless of the example chosen.]

Re:Getting the point across

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses are not required to provide replacement parts to people who keep 10 and 20 year old rust buckets around, slashtard.

why it takes time...

[joe 155]

It is always going to be hard to get people to start using linux on their home computers, people like what they know... I've been using windows since 3.1 and the change to linux is certainly taking a long time and small steps is what is on order... in a government/business sense linux would be easier to adopt... when you're at work you don't need to install things (the one thing I think windows makes so much easier than linux) as the IT dept can handle that the same is true of installing hardware... for home computers though, well, it would be easier to adopt if I had friends who also used and so we could help each other and figure things out...

Re:why it takes time...

[CastrTroy]

when you're at work you don't need to install things (the one thing I think windows makes so much easier than linux)

You haven't used Linux in a few years have you? I find that most of the time installing quality software on Linux is no harder than installing the windows counterpart. Most of the time, you don't need anything outside your distro's packaging system, so installing and finding stuff is much easier. If you try to compile everything from source, you're going to have problems. And you'd have the same problems in windows if you tried the same thing. I install all my software in Mandriva from the RPM's which are provided, add a couple extra download sources, and there's almost no piece of software out there that isn't available.

Re:why it takes time...

[stinky wizzleteats]

when you're at work you don't need to install things (the one thing I think windows makes so much easier than linux)

What are you talking about?

Installing something in Linux (Ubuntu):
-run synaptic
-click the check mark next to the program you want.
-click the install button.
-a few seconds to minutes later, your app is installed and ready to run.

Installing something in Windows:
-(no built in software management system - anything you install for Windows has to be manually found and downloaded or purchased from a store)
-run antivirus against the install media/download file.
-run antimalware against the install media/download file.
-extract download file, as appropriate
-locate install executable on install media, or trust autoplay to run it when you put the disc in.
-click yes on license agreement.
-click no on special offers.
-click no on automatic updates.
-click "yes, I'm sure" on special offers
-install software.
-reboot system (this is always required)
-close daily tip screen for the software you just installed.
-The software you installed put an icon in the systray - right click to close it.
-You don't have the option to close the program, but you can hide the icon.
-Close the messenger tool associated with the systray app that is now spamming you for some unrelated product.
-Run hijackthis to determine how the systray app is running and to kill it.
-At this point, you discover that the software also changed your default home page and changed the menus and added a toolbar to IE.
-"Hijack This" successfully cleans out the crap.
-You try to run the app - "This application has generated an error and will be closed by Wnidows. An error log is being created."
-Thinking it needs the systray bullshit, you uninstall it.
-You must then reboot the system.
-The systray app crashes on startup because it can't find libraries (I thought I killed that thing)
-You attempt to install the software again.
-Install crashes - "you have a running copy of $foo. You must close all $foo windows before attempting to install $foo."

...time passes...

-Your PC finally comes back from the IT department, who had to completely reinstall everything because $foo caused some bizarre and insoluble problem.

Exactly what part of this is easier?

Re:why it takes time...

[firl]

I will concurr with the other two on this. It's much more difficult for me to install software that I will need as useful on windows. need Office? emerge openoffice-bin apt-get install openoffice need a new windows manager emerge gnome apt-get install gnome Automates the process for you, while that is no different than what the previous two have said how about this. Installing software for the hardware: 60% of the time its easier for me to do "more" with my hardware than windows My tv tuner card has a loopback cable, but has the chipset to allow for direct recording of sound over the pci bus. In windows, I have to use the loopback cable. Linux, no cable needed, allowing me to have multiple tv tuner cards and only 1 sound card.

Re:why it takes time...

[mspohr]

"...to install things (the one thing I think windows makes so much easier than linux)"

This is an old troll that is getting tiresome.

Last time I had to install Windows (a few months ago when my daughter's laptop was overrun with spyware, etc.), it took more than a day to install XP, update and patch it, install firewall, virus scanner (and update them), then install MS Office (and update and patch it), plus other software that she used.

Last time I installed Linux, it was also on a laptop (Ubuntu on an IBM) and the full install took less than an hour with the latest updates and the install included full Office suites, graphics, AV software, etc... (more software that I could ever buy for a Windows machine). Absolutey no problems recognizing and installing drivers for the laptop hardware (and my WiFi card was plug and play... it "Just Worked (TM)".

The only excuse for not switching to Linux is just plain laziness... losing that competitive edge?

Re:why it takes time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sore -1 troll? WTF? Somebody want to throw me a bone here? Cause I seriously don't know what I did to deserve that.

Re:why it takes time...

[RobertLTux]

umm lets see for a network install of Mandriva 2006 you would
1 download the boot.iso from a mirror (devel tree)
2 boot up and run the installer
3 reboot and find that you already have a 99% current system already (some stuff is only on the updates)
4 add in the plf sources and the club sources (if you are a club member)
its all P&C from that point

5 Profit!!
and if you check you are looking at north of 12 gigs of software so ....

Re:why it takes time...

[Zerathdune]

for the most part I agree with you.

the software is no longer a problem at all, unless you're using slackware or LFS or something else crazy like that, (which I do on one of My machines) but that doesn't happen unless you're comfortable with it.

The hardware complaint is more legitamte:

you said you tested on an IBM. IBM works particularly well with linux. Try installing on something less friendly. this too is an extreme example, but I've had all of these issues on one machine:

no sound (support exists in the kernel, but no one has the driver ready by default ready, so you have to do a kernel compile)
Power management (same thing)
Wireless card (drivers exist, but not in the core kernel tree, have to do it yourself)
CD-drive (there's been an issue with the ATAPI CD-ROM drivers that's caused certain drives not to function since 2.4.21, still haven't sorted this one out, and getting it installed was trickey to say the least.)

I'll reiterate this, that's an extreme example too. if you go whitebox, you'll generally be fine, but machines from HP, Dell, and the like will often have a couple issues, you might have problems with bleeding-edge hardware, there's no ATI graphcis support, Power management is often an issue, and if something isn't supported out of the box, it tends to be a bit trickier to fix it.

that said, the hardware complaints do tend to be over exaggerated, and the situation really isnt' that bad.

author mistaken?

[phreakv6]

Has the author mistaken Open standards to Open source ?
We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont
we?
HTML, TCP/IP, GSM, PCI , XMPP ( jabber, google talk ).. etc. etc.

Re:author mistaken?

[MichaelSmith]

We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont we?

Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv

Re:author mistaken?

[babbling]

DOC, iTunes, SWF, MOV, etc, etc.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

HTML, TCP/IP, GSM, PCI , XMPP ( jabber, google talk ).. etc. etc.

We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont we?

Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv


Even more interesting: compare which of the above said standards actually fostered growth in technology and paved new ways of doing business:

The first set brought everyone the web, the internet, mobile phones, a plethora of choices for expansion cards, etc... all going down price-wise. Alot of opportunities of doing business also.

The second ones, well... made us have to pick certain platforms/vendors to be relevant... I don't know about everyone else, but over here the price of windows or Office is not going down! Magic food indeed.

Re:author mistaken?

[JollyFinn]

>>We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont we?

>Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv

wmv is open standard . Microsoft has submitted it to standards body inorder to get it as one of the codecs in Blue Ray disc standard, and HD-Disc standard.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

wmv is open standard . Microsoft has submitted it to standards body inorder to get it as one of the codecs in Blue Ray disc standard, and HD-Disc standard.

It is A standard. Not an open one with the full meaning of the word open. Can I make a GPL application that will legally play wmv files? Can I make a closed source freeware application that can play wmv files without paying a royality to microsoft? I would happily admit I am wrong if you provide me links to the opposite...

Re:author mistaken?

[TheRaven64]

DOC

Not open.

iTunes

Not a file format. iTunes does, however, work with standards such as MP3 and MP4. Neither of these are quite open, since you need to pay a small royalty to implement them. AIFF, also supported by iTunes, is open, however.

SWF

Probably counts as half-open. You are free to download the spec and implement things that write SWF files, but not things that read them.

MOV

This is an open standard, and is the official container format for MP4 bytestreams. Not all of the bytestreams embedded in MOV containers are open, however, but it is possible to put something like a Vorbis/Theora stream in one.

Re:author mistaken?

[suv4x4]

"DOC, iTunes, SWF, MOV, etc, etc."

DOC and iTunes ok but, name me open standard alternatives to SWF and MOV... If there's no *good* open standard, companies fill the void.

BTW don't tell me SVG is the alternative of SWF since I'll laugh really hard and tell you 50-60 reasons why not :P

Re:author mistaken?

[Bogtha]

HTML is arguably not open. Since HTML is an SGML application, you need to know SGML's parsing rules in order to parse it properly. SGML is the ISO 8879:1986 standard that costs ~140 EUR / 170 USD / 100 GBP to read.

You can decide not to pay for the standard and wing it instead, which is what browser developers have typically done, and which is why practically none of them can parse HTML correctly.

In my opinion, if you have to pay to read a standard in order to process documents correctly, then you can't really class those documents as using an open standard.

Re:author mistaken?

[jocknerd]

This leads to a reason why we need a new definition of what open standards mean. AAC is an open standard, because it was agreed upon by a committee and its specs were submitted. But its not free. A license for the encoder will set you back about $15K. Not open by my definition. To me, an open standard should be free of patents and licensing fees in addition to having documented specs.

Re:author mistaken?

[Omicron32]

I think he was just pointing out other sources that aren't open but that are very popular.

Re:author mistaken?

[deanj]

I think he's mistaken. Firefox is open source, not an "open standard".

Re:author mistaken?

[bunratty]

But, he encouraged them, if they begin using software that supports open standards now, such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org...

Firefox supports open standards, namely the W3C standards. He never said Firefox is an open standard, as you seem to imply.

Re:author mistaken?

[CastrTroy]

Ah but since HTML is only part of SGML, and doesn't require a full SGML parser, the specs a only a subset. If you want to read the HTML Specs, head on over to W3C.

Re:author mistaken?

[luge]

We certainly use some open standards, but what I was getting at in the talk (I'm the speaker) was the next layer up of closed standards- .doc, ActiveX, AIM/Yahoo Chat (XMPP is not widely used at all yet), etc. Those are the things that lock you into proprietary platforms.

Re:author mistaken?

[Bogtha]

HTML is not a subset of SGML, nothing even remotely close, it's an SGML application, and you do need to understand SGML parsing rules to parse HTML properly.

I know very well where to find the HTML specifications, and if you actually read them (shocking idea, I know), you will find that it doesn't fully describe how to parse HTML, because the whole point of using SGML as a base is because all this stuff has already been specified decades ago. Some HTML specifications include a brief summary or tutorial about basic SGML constructs, but they are not definitive and they skip lots of things.

SGML governs parsing, HTML governs semantics. They are different specifications doing different jobs. If you want to parse HTML properly, you need to read the SGML specification, because that's the standard that covers parsing. And you need to pay for that.

For example, from the HTML 4.01 specification:

Please consult the SGML standard for information about rules governing elements (e.g., they must be properly nested, an end tag closes, back to the matching start tag, all unclosed intervening start tags with omitted end tags (section 7.5.1), etc.).

Lots of the specification is like that. Where it mentions parsing at all, it's done as a stopgap measure and refers you to the SGML standard.

Re:author mistaken?

[SatanicPuppy]

The real problem with HTML is companies who graft non-standard functions on to it and release development tools, etc, that perpetuate these screwy standards, making it much more difficult to create a true standards compliant browser that views all pages.

That's kinda the downside of the open standard...The company that takes the standard, and bends it to fit their agenda, then propogates the bent standard to the world.

Re:author mistaken?

[JollyFinn]

Thats not definition of open standard

Being an open standard also does not necessarily imply that no licenses to patent rights are needed to use the standard or that such licenses are available for free. For example, the standards published by the major internationally-recognized standards bodies such as the ITU, ISO, and IEC are ordinarily considered open, but may require patent licensing fees for implementation.

It might be problem for you that open standard isn't free as in beer. But it is still open standard.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

From the same article:

There is little really universal agreement about the usage of either of the terms "open" or "standard". Some people restrict their use of the term "open" to royalty-free technologies, while others do not; and some people restrict their use of the term "standard" to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis, while others do not.

I'm with the people who attribute open to the full extent of the word. Jocknerd was more to the point that a concrete defenition of the word should be accepted. So we can argue on something more meaningful than how we use words.

Anyway, a standard encumbered with patents and royalities defeats some of the purposes of a true open standard in the first place. One being that you do not have a true leveled field of competition. Two, you need the permition of the one holding the patent to develop an application that utilizes it. It is in microsoft's power to not grant permition to legally use its IP. Or to permit it at a high price that would effectively kill the competition. Look at microsoft's acquired patents on OpenGL and the fears being expressed. Third, why should free applications be excluded from competing? Why should I the consumer have to pay for something when my job can be done the way I want it to with a free (OSS, CSS, doesn't matter) application? This is why we need to emphasize that by saying open standard, we mean truly Free.

The case with wmv is more evil than it not being an open standard though. It is illegally pushed by microsoft, by tying it to windows. Automatically their patent-encumbered standard becomes popular because you can count on it being on 90% of PCs. It's leveraging a monopoly if I ever saw one. But this is a discussion for another thread...

Re:author mistaken?

[TrancePhreak]

You can indeed make a GPL application that will play WMV files. You can use DirectShow to access all the installed codecs in a Windows environment. The decoder is already there, you're just using it.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

You can indeed make a GPL application that will play WMV files. You can use DirectShow to access all the installed codecs in a Windows environment. The decoder is already there, you're just using it.

Yes, if you utilize the decoder that ships with windows. The licensing cost of the decoder is integrated in the windows license. If I'm developing a windows only app, I'm ok. But what happens when I want to port the application to linux or any non microsoft OS? I'll have to make use of patented technology. Not a problem if i'm willing to pay the fee. But how is that 'open'?

Let alone the wmv format is popular because of it being tied with windows. That being said, it is a good format IMHO. But the lack of choice, I believe, is obvious...

Re:author mistaken?

[JollyFinn]

Anyway, a standard encumbered with patents and royalities defeats some of the purposes of a true open standard in the first place. One being that you do not have a true leveled field of competition.

Actually you do. Only thing that is excluded is those who want to use the standard completely free as in beer...

Two, you need the permition of the one holding the patent to develop an application that utilizes it.

Thats part of the open standard process, anyone gets permission and lisence to the patents for the royalty or lisencing fee, that is equal to all parties lisencing the format.

It is in microsoft's power to not grant permition to legally use its IP.Or to permit it at a high price that would effectively kill the competition.

Which rights they give up in the standardisation process, they need to set the price during the standardization process and cannot suddenly up it, thats if standards body have any reasonable rules. Thats what resolved the DRDRAM vs DDR legal questions, in the end.

The case with wmv is more evil than it not being an open standard though. It is illegally pushed by microsoft, by tying it to windows. Automatically their patent-encumbered standard becomes popular because you can count on it being on 90% of PCs. It's leveraging a monopoly if I ever saw one. But this is a discussion for another thread...

Here's a nice irony, the way it goes, Microsoft may actually end up PAYING more for WMV lisences in future than gaining from them. The royalty fee is predetermined, but how it is split for parties owning the IP isn't, so by joining the standard patent pool companies get access to royalty stream. Provided their IP was accepted by patent body as legimate patent claim on WMV. And the current situatiation is that WMV10 has atleast 12 other companies besides Microsoft.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

Interesting points.

Actually you do. Only thing that is excluded is those who want to use the standard completely free as in beer...

This is the one I don't understand. Open standards means equal chance of competition for everyone, even free software developers. Do we not want cost of software to go down? Do we not want free developers to contribute in pushing technology forward? It's fine wmv is a patent-encumbered standard by my book, just as long as we don't mistake it for an open standard like the ones talked about in this article. And just as long as we keep in mind that wmv isn't a 'killer format' everyone needs, just one that is really popular because it is on all windows systems by default. Same with OpenXML.

Here's a nice irony, the way it goes, Microsoft may actually end up PAYING more for WMV lisences in future than gaining from them. The royalty fee is predetermined, but how it is split for parties owning the IP isn't, so by joining the standard patent pool companies get access to royalty stream. Provided their IP was accepted by patent body as legimate patent claim on WMV. And the current situatiation is that WMV10 has atleast 12 other companies besides Microsoft.

This is also very interesting, but it doesn't make the pushing of wmv less illegal. Other companies pushing their own formats (quicktime, real) are also losing because wmv is automatically popular, even if it is not the best format for the job. One could argue that the benefits microsoft is reaping from pushing wmv as a standard, is well accounted for even if microsoft gets nothing out of it economically.

We are in the middle of a format war. Open Standards (as in patent-free, royality-free) are the standards that will foster growth and business oportunities for all. If wmv was such a standard, I would be behind it. Until then, I prefer to want a standard that would give me the same chance as microsoft has to develop something novell and make a living out of it.

Re:author mistaken?

[JollyFinn]

This is the one I don't understand. Open standards means equal chance of competition for everyone, even free software developers.

Not in most standardisation bodies. There are fees and royalties in standards. And they are open in sence that *all* can licence it from standard body, for a standard fee. And they probably use patents of dozens of companies. The key advantage of their method of calling standard is that when a submarine patent goes up, the patent owner has option of joining the patent pool instead of suing the hell out of everyone using the standard, and get income through that. And the patent pool in question is such that *all* patents related to standard are included in the license by those who submit the patents, so they practicly give one point for getting lisences for all patents related to standard. Now if the standard has no fees, the patent owners source of income is suing the standard users.

We are in the middle of a format war. Open Standards (as in patent-free, royality-free) are the standards that will foster growth and business oportunities for all.

Problem with that is that really you don't know *ALL* software patent applications related to field that have been submitted. So called open free standard may have patent problems that those who make the standard do not know, and the patent owners could simply wait for a while until starting license their patents, also if other companies would have patents related to the format they could sue too.

For WMV10 having 12 companies owning the patents wasn't Microsoft plans but as they standardized it the patents started to show up in the patents body. Now would you rather pay constant small fee to patents body or buy the license from all 12 companies separately for price each individual company sets. Since you have to avoid *ALL* softwarepatents in the free standard which is practicly impossible. Or have patented every tiny single portion of it and looked carefully that there isn't any point between expired patents and the patents you have issued for someone to sue upon, and then you could submit it to standards body with goal of making it free standard. The problem for free standards is that everything gets patented.

However I doubt Microsoft would sue over free standard due to their monopoly position, but I don't doubt that there is SOMEONE willing to do it, for gaining few extra bucks.

Re:author mistaken?

[Fanboy Troy]

What you are saying is that open standards are roadblocked by software patents which can be true. This is true in OSS also. But this still does not make wmv an 'open standard', nor does it make microsoft promoting it, using windows, legal.

Anyhow, let's rethink why patents were/are granted in the first place: Putting it simple, to give an advantage to a small inventor to implement his idea and profit from it, before someone with more resources beats him to it. Patents weren't meant to give mega corporations the power to block ideas under the excuse that they own IP as if it were some kind of exclusive asset that they own forever. This promotes prasitic trends in the IT industry and quiet frankly brings up a barrier to small developers on what they can and can not implement, because as you pointed out, it is hard not to infringe on a patent. The use of patents today is abusing the intent of patent law and therefor the whole patent system must be reformed so patents are upheld for a reasonable time (Say, 18 months and thereafter be released into public domain), if not be rendered totally obsolete on software. This is why, as a Europian, I'm with the people against software patents in Europe.

Anyhow, I think your previous post points out wonderfully why software patents stifle innovation and raise roadblocks for small developers.

When you're ahead...

[Anonymous MadCoe]

I once had a standards seminar where soemone made the interresing remark that open standards only matter to companies that are behind in marketshare. Once a company is dominant they want closed standards.

Of course "open source" can hardly be defined as a company.

Re:When you're ahead...

[CRCulver]

I once had a standards seminar where soemone made the interresing remark that open standards only matter to companies that are behind in marketshare. Once a company is dominant they want closed standards.

Perhaps that can be true, but I'm inclined to think that this is no longer so sure now that ESR's thoughts in The Cathedral and the Bazaar have spread throughout the IT world. The more a company supports "open" ideas, such as open standards and open source, the more support it will get from the open source developer community. When a company is supported by open source developers, they can get a lot of unpaid labour that can push their products ahead of the crowd. Sure, certain licenses may require that the developers' contributions be available to all, but by the time competing companies implement the ideas, the first company should already have some new advantage.

If corporations want to profit from this community spirit, then they need to avoid pissing off their labour force, and so supporting open standards is a good idea.

Re:When you're ahead...

[Anonymous MadCoe]

I think there is something to say for both points of view. In some ways the "free labour" sounds tempting, on the other hand having a closed shop with "your own" developers can be much more predictable (mark the can be != is ;-) ). And in that way it is harder to profit from your investment.

And of course there are branches (like where I'm in) where things are mostly secret and the actual cost of internal development is lower than the cost of leaking information (which could just be a way of doing things).

I think in the end it mostly depends on the type of business you're in.

Re:When you're ahead...

[TheRaven64]

It is worth pointing out that this is true of the producers of the software, not of the users. Users always benefit from open standards because it provides them with a second source. If your supplier is forced to compete, then this is obviously beneficial to you.

Re:When you're ahead...

[Kjella]

I once had a standards seminar where soemone made the interresing remark that open standards only matter to companies that are behind in marketshare. Once a company is dominant they want closed standards.

Well, no big surprise there, to me at least.

1) Shutting out competitors, consumer lock-in
2) Easier to develop, whatever you ship IS the standard
3) If you need a feature just add it without the buerocracy
4) Choose what platforms you want it on, in case you have a vested interest in that
5) Make competitors spend time and effort reverse engineering instead of developing
6) Others are a lot less likely to be smartasses and show improvements to your product
7) Public Relations - setting the standard reaffirms your position as market leader
8) Bait and switch - get them hooked on your format, then bleed them on related products

Those are just those I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.

Re:When you're ahead...

[luge]

Very good point. And the folks I was talking to last week were the kinds of users who are so large that they can single-handedly produce change in what standards are used, to turn the tables so that users benefit instead of producers. At least, that is what I hope happens and why I spoke ;)

Starts with DRM

[Neo-Rio-101]

People are only going to awake to open standards when they realise that the digital movie or tune that they bought suddenly doesn't work anymore because the format is old, closed, and the company went bankrupt. I.e., people will only care about open standards when they run into lovely DRM more often in their daily lives.

Now, from a business point of view.... open standards is actually much harder for IT outsourcing companies to handle. Most of the employees of such companies (who are cheap) are low skill, MCSE people, and even if they aren't, they couldn't write a PERL script to save their hides. Problems start when IT head management wants to try and get these people to help troubleshoot hardware issues with FreeBSD, hack the Linux kernel, and develop and deploy untested beta software for critical systems all at MCSE skills and prices.

Not only is it hard to find people to be Open Source nuts and support open standards, but they cost more. This is where Microsoft wins out with PHBs, because at they pick cheap and fast out of the (Cheap/Fast/Quality) trinity... then they end up accepting locked standards.

Re:Starts with DRM

[babbling]

If Apple were more daring, they could sell as many iTunes songs as they could between now and the release of Vista, and then not release an iTunes client for Vista. Since there is a good chance the current version of iTunes won't work on the final version of Vista, people would be forced to either give up their library of songs from iTunes, or upgrade from WinXP to OSX rather than Vista.

Of course, Apple won't do this because it is better for them (for the time being) to have people locked into iPods rather than risking people actually giving up their library of iTunes music by making it not supported in Vista.

Re:Starts with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also the number one reason Apple won't do an iTunes subscription service. Subscription == no lock'in.

Re:Starts with DRM

[Tim C]

people would be forced to either give up their library of songs from iTunes, or upgrade from WinXP to OSX rather than Vista.

You seem to be forgetting option C), namely "or not upgrade their OS at all".

Re:Starts with DRM

[VGPowerlord]

Since there is a good chance the current version of iTunes won't work on the final version of Vista, people would be forced to either give up their library of songs from iTunes, or upgrade from WinXP to OSX rather than Vista.

I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?

Re:Starts with DRM

[ookaze]

I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?

I have programs that don't run anymore, could you rethink your statement ?
And launching a program is not enough, it has to work too.
Virtualdub tool to acquire video from my TV card did not work anymore, the software for my Miro card won't even launch anymore on WIndows XP, Theme Park wil crash constantly when it launches. That's 2 examples, but there are way more.
You people are such BS seller with your godly Windows backward compatibility.

Re:Starts with DRM

[babbling]

Windows Vista currently has a rather poor backward-compatibility. (about 40%) It will definitely improve before the final release, but it probably won't get past 70% - 80%.

Re:Starts with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have my install cd of Sam and Max...and running it in XP produced no sound. Not sure if it's fair since it was a DOS-based game, but Win 3.1 DID run over DOS so I guess that should count, right?

Either way, ScummVM ran it just fine. In this case, much better than XP did, since I got sound. It was definitely nice to hear the beginning "Frieeeeeends???" again.

Oh, and ScummVM runs on my Ubuntu box, too.

Re:Starts with DRM

[radio_nut]

I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?

"I can" and "I can always" are very different. Heck there are Win2k programs that do not work on XP. at the same time there are probably Win 1.0 programs that will. So what.

I initially moved to OS/2 from WFW 3.11 when WFW would balk at some Win 3.0 programs and I know that good old DOS programs were happier on my OS/2 machine than any Windows platform. I could also multitask the DOS programs under OS/2 but in Windows95 many dos programs required me to only boot DOS and then that killed any multitasking.

I have since moved to Linux for my daily activity but I still run Win2k for some things. I'm not a zealot for any OS. Each has advantages and disadvantages, but backwords compatibility is

a) not always as advertized
b) unrequired bloatware
c) rarely important
d) always important
e) a system used to fool users into upgrading, then when it fails to be, causes the user to buy new applications.

If version 2.0 of an OS is 90% backwords compatible, it can be advertized as backwards compatible and you might upgrade from version 1.0. However in a short period of time you will almost certainly (especially at a workstation or home computer) run into an application in the 10% group and you will have to upgrade that as well. In the meantime the bloatware makes everything run slower so you will upgrade your hardware. Soon a new Version 3.0 of the Operating System will come out and you will see that it is backwards compatible and you will want to be able to point out to the Jones family that you are not a neo-luddite and you will buy the new version and everything repeats.

If you manage to resist and you are connected to the Internet, the various worms, trojans, virri, and malware will eventually require you to patch, fix, upgrade, etc until a new version is the simpler solution and you will submit. Ressistance is futile!

Re:Starts with DRM

[VGPowerlord]

I have experienced several general categories of programs that have problems in newer versions of Windows.

1. Drivers - Windows 2000/XP uses a different architecture for drivers.
2. Anything requiring direct hardware access. Windows 2000/XP requires all programs to use drivers and kills off programs that attempt direct hardware access.
3. DOS programs. Sound emulation for cmd.exe is iffy. Combined with the previous point, DOS programs are hit or miss. DOSBox is your friend in both *nix and Windows.
4. Programs that explicitly look for NT DLLs and refuse to run if they are located

Even though I only mentioned compatibility back to Windows 3.1, I mentioned DOS here because Theme Park is a DOS program.

On top of that, you can search for drivers for hardware. Google turned up something when I searched for Miro. It may help, or it may not. I can't tell, because I don't know which Miro model you have.

Re:Starts with DRM

[VGPowerlord]

Anonymous users aren't exactly considered a reliable source. Hence why professors don't allow you to cite Wikipedia in research papers.

Re:Starts with DRM

[VGPowerlord]

Yes, certain categories of programs aren't compatible.

I know a specific category of Win2K programs that don't work on XP: CD writing software. Microsoft dropped the ASPI interface in XP (although you can download it from Adaptec's site), which several major programs required. I imagine that Roxio and Nero weren't too happy about that.

In general, though, drivers and programs that perform hardware-related tasks are the least likely to work with newer versions of Windows. DOS programs are the only ones that fare worse.

Speaking of DOS programs, I left them out for a reason: Windows NT/2K/XP sucks at running them. DOSBox works much better.

Re:Starts with DRM

[VGPowerlord]

Windows XP seems to have problems with sound in DOS programs... if they don't crash outright.

Having said that, I have lots of LucasArts games, so ScummVM is a great help.

Nope!

[babbling]

No. Ordinary people still won't care, no matter which way you explain it to them. The only example they will understand is when they get burnt by it, and even then most of them probably won't realise why things are so difficult, or that they could be easier.

Re:Nope!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imho you are wrong.

When I studied computer science in the late 1980s, as a teenager I naively *assumed* that the world ran on open standards.
What other kind of standards are there after all? If it's not published it's not a standard. I spent many months learning the (then) relatively new OSI model, soaking up IEEE papers on how ethernet and RS232 worked. All that seemed perfectly normal to me. The very definition of a general purpose computing and communication device almost *must* be based on open published standards or nothing will interoperate. Everything seemed like it was converging towards the sensible and neccessary state of affairs - the C language had replaced having to learn multitude assembly languages and so on....

Then cue Microsoft....

I don't hate Microsoft because of their politics, or because of their shoddy products. I hate them because they offend
my sensibilities as a computer scientist and programmer. In my opinion MS have set back computing a decade.
They have implemented a deliberate policy of standards breaking, lock out/in, reinventing wheels and creating intentional obsolescence. They have broken every rule I learned as as a CS grad.

When I talk to regular Joes about this, and explain the simple real reason why programmers hate MS, that it's nothing to do with bitterness at Bill gates or even the huge market share they have, or their political manipulations, but rather that it's because they break standards, and people understand in an instant.

I don't think people "don't care". Most people are like I was as the naive teenager - they *expect* things to work together. After all what would be the point of creating an incompatible product?

When you explain to people why Microsoft suck don't get drawn into the business and ethics debates. Don't mention the spyware and dubious politics, it just makes you seem like a kook. Focus on explaining how and why they deliberately break international standards.

Re:Nope!

[ajs318]

People of a certain mindset expect things to work together. People of other mindsets do not.

Mass is a property shared by all matter. But people weigh themselves in stones, their babies in pounds, loose produce by asking for pounds or ounces and getting an equivalent amount in grammes, and buy pre-packed goods weighed in [kilo]grammes. It never occurs to them to think that they could weigh everything in kilogrammes and be able to compare their own mass to their baby or a bag of cement or a tub of coleslaw or half a dozen bananas.

So it goes with audio equipment. Up to the 1970s, almost everything with a loudspeaker in it had a 5-pin DIN socket to connect something else to use its amplifier; if it was a tape recorder, the input pins would have been wired up too, so you could record other things onto tape. By the 1980s, these connectors -- much used by a tiny minority and ignored by nearly everyone else -- were disappearing. When I modified a radio-cassette plater to connect up a portable CD player to it, people asked my why I had done it ..... my attitude was "why not?" {It was also significantly cheaper, and less wasteful, than buying a new radio/cassette/CD player. There was nothing wrong with either appliance -- apart from the radio's unwillingness to accept an external signal.}

Big Business doesn't like interoperability. Big Business wants you to ditch all your old kit whenever something new comes along. Do you think every TV set, VCR, satellite receiver and DVD player would have a SCART socket -- an international standard -- if it wasn't mandated by law? Manufacturers are really galled by the prospect that you can keep one bit of equipment when you replace another.

Lack of interoperability, in other words vendor lock-in, is what keeps software vendors going. And there is going to be tremendous resistance to change.

Re:Nope!

[cold wolf]

"They" understand because many of them already ARE having problems getting one kind of thing to work on another. I made an analogy to ships and islands:

Today it's like we each buy the right to an island, but there's no ships going to any other island--you're stuck there, unable to interact with the rest of the world. How do we build the ships? Make every form of communication open. This includes all networking protocols (among them, instant messaging and VoIP) and file formats. These are the ships, and if we make them open and free everyone will be able to stay on their island of choice but never be cut off from the rest of the world.

The Capaitalist's greed is the Ruiner. If we ask (and we do), companies won't do anything about it. We need to get government legislation, and I think if we brought the /. effect to the poles, we could make it happen. I proposed this before in some other article, but all I got was "great idea!" and nothing happened. So start emailing the /. crew...

Open Standards

[dueyfinster]

My uncle is so non-technical, he struggles to play solitare, but I managed to get Ubuntu on to his machine, and he uses it occassionly..........for solitare.......ah well Anyway moral of the story is that I explained Open Source to him using his work: "Hey Tommy I want to tell you about Open Source, Ubuntu and why Microsoft is wrong" First I told him about Mass. Debacle.......he started to lose interest...... Then I started "Think of it as fittings, what if everyone used different ones, it would be impossible to have the right tool (He is a welder/fitter)" Then he totally got it, and went on ranting about how Americans don't use the biggest standard of them all (Metric System, that is) and why Microsoft are no differet......

Re:Open Standards

[Josuah]

I think you've gotten Open Standards and Open Source mixed up. Open Standards is like those fittings and making sure everyone uses the same ones. Open Source and Closed Source would be like two different types of power tools. If you buy/build the open source power tool, you can do things to it that you wouldn't be able to with the closed source power tool (e.g. change saw blades on a circular saw) if you put in your own effort. While with the closed source one, you might get a different level/experience of support, but you wouldn't be able to tinker with it to change its behavior (although it might still support changing saw blades).

You missed one...

[PinkyDead]

You're right, of course about personal usage and business usage.

But another hugely significant factor is Government/Public Sector usage. Most Governments see themselves as in it for the long term - maybe not in the form of the current administration, or even the current socioeconomic model - however, even through major changes the survival of the information is paramount. Even to the extent of a ridiculous waste of resources.

To this end, they will probably see (e.g.) Microsoft as a threat to their knowledge base - envisioning that their bureaucratic empires will long see off the demise of such structures (they have a point, as most bureaucracies are far older than any other organisation currently in existance). For this reason we are seeing more and more public sector organisations leaning towards open standards (the most prominent example of late being Massachusetts).

It is worth remembering the importance of public sector contracts to the world's economies - they have a lot of influence.

2006?

[miro f]

wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?

Re:2006?

[PenguinBoyDave]

No silly...

2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001 were the years of the Linux Desktop. I still have my Linux Magazines to prove it. After all, it was mentioned every January or February issue...

Re:2006?

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?

Nope, and looking at other Desktops (and their 08/15-users) I really, REALLY hope _never_ to see that day when Linux is considered (by 08/15-users) as being "Ready for the Desktop"

I'm not asking for the interest of 08/15-users for my favourite OS. Because in consequence the interest of 08/15-users will result in bloat and inconsistencies invented by people who are after the money of 08/15-users.

Re:2006?

[joe 155]

you must have missed the memo, it was 98...

Linux Affecting MS Sales?

Contributed by CmdrTaco on Sat Jan 10 at 10:27AM EST
[Linux] From the up-and-coming-os dept
Evelyn Mitchell sent us this story where you can read about slowdowns in Client OS sales. According to the article, Microsoft still controls 87% of the operating systems sold last year. The gem though is the comments about IS managers evaluating free OS's like Linux. Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world in a big way?

According to this it happened 8 years ago....

Maybe not this year...

[Cloud K]

"Maybe 2006 is not the year that Linux ends up on your desktops."

At the risk of sounding troll-ish I love how variations (is / is not) of this phrase have been going on since KDE 1.0 was released in 1998. It's taken at least 8 years of "Maybe Linux will be ready for the desktop this year" for someone to finally say "Actually, maybe it won't"!

I sincerely hope it *does* end up on the common 'desktop' one day, but it's not looking too likely at this rate :)

Back on topic, aren't even Microsoft opening their Word format now? I remember whisperings about them using XML, which sounds promising. Digging their own grave, got to love them for it!

Re:Maybe not this year...

[ajs318]

XML is not necessarily open. After all, it's extensible, and extensions can be proprietary. Microsoft could have a container like

<SecretProprietaryExtension>
..... loads of weirdy characters .....
</SecretProprietaryExtension>

and as long as their schema mentioned <SecretProprietaryExtension> as a valid container, then it would be valid XML. If they really wanted to arse it up for their competitors, they could describe the document entirely within the secret proprietary extension; but put in some valid-looking markup that would actually create a less-than-perfect rendering In Real Life.

Microsoft's entire business model revolves around making new versions of Office that are incompatible with previous versions, giving a few copies away for free, and thereby forcing everyone else to upgrade in order to read the files their friends have sent them. Really, it's just a form of built-in obsolescence ..... unlike hardware, you can't make software fail after a certain amount of use.

Re:Maybe not this year...

[BenjyD]

While that is possible, I haven't seen anything like it in the file format so far. You can see samples and the draft spec on the OpenXML website. From what I've seen, it should at least be easier to interoperate with Office12 XML than with the old binary formats. Not that that is saying all that much, of course.

Re:Maybe not this year...

[AntiDragon]

Yeah. But it's not an "Open Standard". It's a spec of how to read the XML format, not how to write it. Some of the XML fields contain binary encoded data which isn't documented. So it's not open. They've just deigned to let people be able to pull some data from their format (like being able to only query half the tables in a database).

So no, it's not Open...sigh...

Re:Maybe not this year...

[BenjyD]

Can you point out some of the binary-only elements in the file format? I've yet to see any myself.

Re:Maybe not this year...

[lbbros]

I refer you to groklaw.net, where a discussion on this has been going on for a while. That XML is not "open", and prevents complete interoperability.

Re:Maybe not this year...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe 2006 is not the year that Linux ends up on your desktops."

At the risk of sounding troll-ish I love how variations (is / is not) of this phrase have been going on since KDE 1.0 was released in 1998.

B...b...but 1998 was the year Linux ended up on my desktop. I'd been using it off-and-on for the past 18 months or so, but when I tried a KDE 1.0 beta, I realised that it was better than Windows 98. The interface was better in some places and worse in some places, but overall, KDE 1.0 tipped the balance in Linux's favour.

Now compare KDE 1.0 with KDE 3.5. Still think Linux isn't ready for the desktop?

Neo: "What are you trying to tell me?" ...

[atrocious cowpat]

Neo: "What are you trying to tell me? That I can run Linux?"
Morpheus: "No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to."

Re:Neo: "What are you trying to tell me?" ...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Cypher:If Linus had told us the truth, we would've told him to shove that free OS hobby right up his ass!

Re:"Blame Fraunhofer, you should use OGG instead!"

[bloobloo]

What are you talking about?

An advocate does not just defend lost causes. It is the equivalent of a barrister in England - a lawyer who speaks for their client in court.

Who modded this troll Insightful?

False dichotomy

[bloobloo]

You're looking at it only from the perspective of the developers of the standards. I'd be surprised if anyone could show me how an end user benefits from closed standards.

Open Standards...nothing new

[PenguinBoyDave]

Every Linux World for the past three years has talked about this. From CA's CEO last year in Boston, to ODSL, Red Hat, SuSE, MySQL, etc. etc., the message is the same every year. Open Standards good, proprietary bad.

The problem is that we sit here and beat our drums, but someone comes along and says "when Linux is ready..."

Last I heard there were many organizations (Government, etc.) already using Linux on the desktop. I'm sure they will tell you it is ready.

Re:Open Standards...nothing new

[soupdevil]

Linux is ready. But the applications aren't, especially for professionals. Rosegarden can't replace SONAR, GIMP can't replace Photoshop, Nvu/Blufish can't replace Dreamweaver, Ardour can't replace ProTools. I have a dual-boot of Ubuntu and WinXP on my laptop, but if I'm doing anything other than browsing and emailing, I boot into Windows.

Re:Open Standards...nothing new

[kbielefe]

I think the proper question is not when is Linux ready for the organization, but when is the organization ready for Linux?

Hardly anyone realized it back then, but the best time to switch to Linux was about 7-10 years ago. IT shops didn't have 10 years of Windows-only experience; it was new to everybody. BSODs were a common occurrence. The relatively recent introduction of the Internet to the unwashed masses brought a huge influx of worms that people were still learning how to deal with properly. I still remember the amazement that my modem lights didn't blink all the time while using Linux. There were still a lot of people who didn't use MS Office, so sharing between different office suites was a common problem.

The main drawback to using Linux back then was you had to be very careful about what hardware you bought, especially modems and printers. However, you usually ended up with higher quality hardware. I have an external modem I bought back then that is better than the modem that came with the computer I bought last year and still in good working order. A huge number of people dismissed Linux back then because it didn't work with their modem/printer/whatever and they wouldn't risk the cost of new hardware that was easy to get working with Linux.

The bottom line is if you didn't switch during the Windows "dark ages," why would you switch now from a Windows that is more stable, mature, and familiar? Linux is getting better every day, but that is not enough. Something about the organization must change in order for it to consider a switch.

Rip Off

[CmdrGravy]

Yes, very original. Well done.

Re:"Blame Fraunhofer, you should use OGG instead!"

[MartinJW]

From a slashdot newbie - is it normal to cut and paste responses from elsewhere? The original

author not mistaken.

[caudron]

We use Open standards very much in our everyday life dont we? HTML, TCP/IP, GSM, PCI , XMPP ( jabber, google talk ).. etc. etc.

Not as much as we should:

MS Office (DOC, XLS, PPT, MDB), MS Outlook (PST), File Systems and Sharing(FAT, SMB), Non-ANSI SQL (T-SQL, PL-SQL), etc....

Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/patents.html

Gvt and Open Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been a big supporter of open standards in the government for years and have encouraged the adoption of them in several areas. The data is the people's data and should not be held hostage to closed, proprietary formats, especially if some of the data is to be made available to the general public at some point.

What the government needs are laws or mandates for open formats whenever possible for government and government contractor created documents for several reasons including the need for retention, ownership by the people of the country, and access by its citizens. It's the people's data and should not be restricted by a closed format or incure cost by the people to access their own material.

   

Re:Gvt and Open Standards

[OhHellWithIt]

The U.S. federal government was all for standards a decade or so ago. My employer bid on a contract for a government agency that wanted a POSIX-compliant system. We prepared and demonstrated a solution using Unix that was fully compliant, and the contract went to the incumbent, who had bid Windows NT with some sort of POSIX add-on module. Then came the antitrust litigation against Microsoft. You'd think something would have changed, but when I worked on-site at the Dept. of Justice a couple of years ago, they were upgrading to Windows XP with Microsoft Internet Explorer as the official browser. The only open document standard in use was PDF.

Re:Gvt and Open Standards

[I'm Don Giovanni]

PDF isn't "open". A small subset of PDF is ECMA standard, but Adobe controls the whole of PDF. They do provide specs for creating new PDF docs and reading PDF for the purpose of displaying the contents. But I don't know about editing existing PDF docs; seems that only Adobe products can edit PDF (maybe due to the PDF license?).

Re:Gvt and Open Standards

[Vasey]

If you can read and create the documents, why wouldn't you be able to edit them? That seems a somewhat strange distinction to me. If nothing else, you could open the document and then save the changed document to a new PDF, which is the same thing as editing it in effect.

Re:Gvt and Open Standards

[OhHellWithIt]

It's true that Adobe owns and controls the PDF standard; however, the specifications are freely available, gratis, for anyone to write applications to create and display PDF. I don't remember the details of their restrictions on the license, but I recall them requiring that viewing applications respect the encryption on locked PDFs and something about not writing applications that directly compete with their products. One could argue the finer points of whether it's an open standard, but my point is that this is the closest I saw at DOJ.

In short..

[mOOzilla]

What good is a system if it cannot talk to other systems (programs services etc).

Open Standards Do Not Matter

[ajs318]

Open Standards do not matter at all to the vast majority of people.

Many people, and many businesses, are committing their entire lives to digital storage under a plethora of proprietary, closed standards. One by one, the suppliers who created these standards will cease to exist -- companies will go out of business, or be bought up and asset-stripped.

What does this mean? The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment. None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable. Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.

But a generation from now, nobody will even remember that Open Standards ever existed. Everything will be locked up behind proprietary standards, jealously-guarded secrets. If you're allowed to program your own computer at all, you'll be severely restricted in what you can do with it.

And nobody will care. The problem will be thought of as "just one of the unforeseen hazards of trusting electronics", and lived with. By that stage we will already have draconian DRM in documents, and in most cases it will be so badly misconfigured that there will be no cut-and-paste; an operator will end up having to use two computers and two monitors, retyping information from one screen onto the other. All this will just be thought of as the way the world naturally works.

Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why nearly everyone is going to Microsoft. It's one company with lots and lots of money that will **never** go out of business (just how many $B in the bank do they have now?). One company that **appears** to support their older products (for example, a part of the Vista delay). No more WordPerfect versus WordStar versus Ami Pro versus Word. All just use Word and all is fine, or so the mass market thinks (it's group think). M$'s bundling agreements further this goal. From the perspective of Joe Sixpack, his computer came with Word (or Works) and it is fine for him and his kids. They write their elementary school papers and write their scouting reports. All works and it didn't cost him anything (it came with the bloody computer). [All my computers, both Widows and Linux have OpenOffice, Gimp, and Firefox -- my children use them and not MS Word/Works. My middle son has a Linux-only computer and loves it.]

My sister has lots of old financial information locked in closed formats. All will have to be rekeyed or is lost (if she can even run the old programs under DOS). Today, you can usually export a spreadsheet into CSV or export from most programs into transportable formats like XML (closed or open, it doesn't matter). That was not the case a few years ago. Joe Sixpack sees an export function from his money management program (M$ Money) and can import into a spreadsheet (Excel). So long as he can do that, he is happy (despite both programs being from one company -- he doesn't care). He can display his photos using the built-in viewers and can even print them. He is happy. He does not care about DRM because his photos just work on his computer and can even be e-mailed to his buddies and work on their computers. He might be a bit miffed when he can't get a movie or download audio, but he just uses the programs that M$ supplied (unless he has an Ipod).

So far, DRM will only lock him out of some music and movies. At this point in time, this is more of a PITA than a real problem. So far, his photos, documents, and personal recordings are transportable, exportable, and not locked out (in his opinion -- he has not seen the fine print in the licenses for the formats, the restrictions, etc.).

Only when DRM bites him in the butt will he take notice (like the new CD that he could not play on his computer or the Sony CD that caused him to take his computer to Geek Squad and pay $100 to fix it).

Government is different. Their documents need to be available forever. Their documents belong to the people, not some creation called "the Government" (at least here in the US where the Government is for the people, by the people, etc.). The issue is about free and open access to those Government documents. It is about data retention and the ability to read those documents in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years. Imagine if the temples in Egypt had been written in M$ Word 1.0 format. Not only would we have to have discovered the Rosetta stone, but we would have had to learn how to decode a strange, unknown, proprietary format (and maybe have had to break laws to do it).

Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter

[ajs318]

That's why nearly everyone is going to Microsoft. It's one company with lots and lots of money that will **never** go out of business (just how many $B in the bank do they have now?)

In a No Limit Poker game, once one player has more money than all the others put together, they are -- barring extraordinarily bad play -- mathematically certain to walk away with every chip on the table. That's the position Microsoft are in now.

So far, DRM will only lock [the ordinary user] out of some music and movies. At this point in time, this is more of a PITA than a real problem. So far, his photos, documents, and personal recordings are transportable, exportable, and not locked out (in his opinion -- he has not seen the fine print in the licenses for the formats, the restrictions, etc.).

So far, yes. But DRM is coming to Office. It inevitably will end up affecting home users, possibly in ways you cannot imagine now.

Only when DRM bites him in the butt will he take notice (like the new CD that he could not play on his computer or the Sony CD that caused him to take his computer to Geek Squad and pay $100 to fix it).

And he probably will still think this is "just something that happens", as much a part of owning a computer as having to plug it into the mains. All that will come about from cases like this, if anything, is that audio discs in future will be labelled with "DO NOT INSERT THIS DISC INTO A COMPUTER" or somesuch. From Sony's point of view, it's a clear cheese-sandwich-in-the-VCR situation.

Government is different. Their documents need to be available forever. Their documents belong to the people, not some creation called "the Government" (at least here in the US where the Government is for the people, by the people, etc.). The issue is about free and open access to those Government documents. It is about data retention and the ability to read those documents in 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years.

I don't think even governments are bothered enough. We may pay their wages {or get carted off to prison if we don't -- but hey, at least in prison you can still light up}, but that doesn't mean much to them.

If and when government documents become unreadable, the issue in all probabilty will just be shrugged off. Non-computer-owners are "Luddites" {or too cheap to buy a computer or too poor for a government to want to be bothered with}; computer owners who use alternatives to Windows are "Freaks" {or too cheap to buy "proper" software}.

By the time we reach the point where the problem is impacting severely on governments' ability to serve the people, it will be too late. Government officials probably will not even realise that there is a problem, or that there might have been a better way to do things all along. And if they do, they won't dare admit to it .....

Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter

[FLEB]

The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment.
JPEG? (Okay, I'll admit that I ought to convert the NEFs for storage one of these days.)

None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable.
CDDA? MP3?

Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
Okay, I'll give you DOC.

Open standards (or at least easily-licensed enough standards to be on a par with open) are nearly ubiquitous, and widely supported for both reading and writing. With the fact that these formats are open and digital (allowing lossless medium-to-medium copy), anyone who puts forth even a minimal effort to, say, drop all the CD-ROM backups onto whatever nails shut CD-ROM's coffin, there's no reason why most of today's content can't live on far into the future.

Aside from the .DOC format, an anomoly, and formats for new and growing technologies, like digital video, things are only getting better in regard to open standardization. I predict that once Internet video has been around for a few years, it will also develop "Lowest-common-denominator" standards just like its predecessors.

Re:Open Standards Do Not Matter

[ajs318]

The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment.
JPEG? (Okay, I'll admit that I ought to convert the NEFs for storage one of these days.)

Who says they have to use JPEG? Camera manufacturers are already concealing the RAW formats used by their cameras; IMHO this is being done primarily to conceal the true pixel count prior to interpolation {thereby allowing outrageous claims regarding the sensor}. It's possible that future digital cameras might use a brand new, encrypted, DRM file format which can only be viewed with appropriate, closed-source image editing software supplied with the camera -- or a deeply-hooked browser plug-in.

None of the recordings of the band you played in when you were younger will be listenable.
CDDA? MP3?

CDDA has already ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes; replaced by a range of nasty hybrid discs which, more by luck than design, can be read by an audio CD player. Some of these "copy prevention" technologies actually degrade the audio demonstrably and/or shorten the useful lifetime of the disc. And by the time the {unenforcible in Europe and Britain} patents on the MP3 algorithm expire, nobody will be using it. Home recording software will incorporate DRM, so you can store your music on the Internet and access it anywhere -- but nobody else can access it. The usual "without your say-so" bit will be quietly forgotten; in order to give other people permission to listen to your music, you will have to buy a special licence for the record companies' version of the DRM software.

Business letters written just a few years ago won't be readable.
Okay, I'll give you DOC.

The next generation of MS Office software will incorporate DRM features. Ostensibly this will be to protect "sensitive information" in the corporate environment; for example, ensuring an e-mailed memo cannot be opened by anyone save the intended recipients, printed on a printer in a communal area, or that it self-destructs after a set number of readings. The fact that this will be an absolute 'mare to set up and manage properly, means it will most probably be set up and used badly. Home users {expected to be running Office Home Edition, which probably won't have support for DRM initially} will in actual fact probably be running pirated versions of Office Pro. I can't imagine that anybody who tries to lay out a document using spaces would be able to set up DRM properly; so e-mails probably will end up on a "read it three times and then it disappears" basis.

Open standards (or at least easily-licensed enough standards to be on a par with open) are nearly ubiquitous, and widely supported for both reading and writing. With the fact that these formats are open and digital (allowing lossless medium-to-medium copy), anyone who puts forth even a minimal effort to, say, drop all the CD-ROM backups onto whatever nails shut CD-ROM's coffin, there's no reason why most of today's content can't live on far into the future.

But how much of today's content will be relevant in the future?

Aside from the .DOC format, an anomoly, and formats for new and growing technologies, like digital video, things are only getting better in regard to open standardization. I predict that once Internet video has been around for a few years, it will also develop "Lowest-common-denominator" standards just like its predecessors.

Digital video formats are going to be the proving ground for newer and nastier DRM technologies. Look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Once there is a suitably robust DRM solution out there, video discs and players will be cheap; it will be the movies themselves which will be pay-per-view. Rewinding and watching a scene again will cost you extra; there won't be a fast-forward button. This will be sold to an ignorant public as thoug

Re:best reason to use open standards...

[morgdx]

The more people who take that stance, the less attachments they'll receive.

Standards drive innovation - use legislation

[StandardsSchmandards]

Two observations:

1. The standards debate is often run by technical people who tend to focus on the actual standard instead of the end result. More discussion on what standards actually help you achieve is always welcome and should help get the point across.
2. It is often said that a market leader in one niche has no interest in adhering to standards. This may be true (as it will help keep competitors out of your market share). This is why legislation has to make sure that standards are enforced. With such legislation competition and innovation continues. Without such legislation customers will end up in vendor lock-in and innovation will be insignificant and more of a "marketing thing" to keep customers happy.

Re:Standards drive innovation - use legislation

[ClosedSource]

Traditionally standards were about codifying existing practice, not creating new technologies. It was typically the market leaders (often monopolies), who created the technology, got it working and then sought to create a standard around it.

Obviously standards created using this traditional approach are going to be adopted more readily than an approach that is designed to be an alternative to the existing leading technologies.

Re:best reason to use open standards...

[heinousjay]

Your intentions are good, but the execution is off base. Zealotry doesn't attract mainstream followers, only rabid believers. All the rabid believers already believe, in the case of the 'Open' software world. This means your approach is valid if you want to preach to the choir, but in the rest of the world it's the equivalent of standing on the street corner screaming about the end times.

I wish I could suggest a better approach, but the thing is, it's really just a technical issue. It has social ramifications, but mainly for technical folks. There's very little reason for mainstream users to care. All that can be done is some vague handwaving about rights and freedoms that typical users are in no position to exercise.

Possibly the best route to take is cost, but for most people the cost of software isn't really that onerous. A few hundred dollars a year isn't terribly out of line for the provided benefit.

government-approved applications

[RussP]

I work for the federal govt, and I recently received a notice from my organization stating that, for security reasons, only certain "standard" applications will be allowed. MS Office is one of them

I don't have the memo handy, but if I recall, it applied only to PCs and Macs. I'm not sure if "PC" means a "Windows PC" or if it also includes Linux PCs. So that may or may not leave the door open to OpenOffice (or other ODF-based suites) for Linux at least.

In any case, this mandate really burns me. Just when the world may be ready to start abandoning the MS monopoly, my organization is trying to reinforce it for "security" reasons.

The other thing that gets me is that if I protest, most of my colleagues will think I just have some sort of quirky, neurotic aversion to MS because Bill Gates is "too rich" or something. You'd be amazed how many otherwise well-informed technical people out there are truly clueless about the standards war going on.

Re:government-approved applications

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you too have to remove your Linux partition or get special permission to use it to access the Internet? I have at least 4 friends who used to use Linux on their laptops to access the Internet but had to go to Windows due to such decrees.

Re:government-approved applications

[RussP]

"Did you too have to remove your Linux partition or get special permission to use it to access the Internet? I have at least 4 friends who used to use Linux on their laptops to access the Internet but had to go to Windows due to such decrees."

No, it's not *that* bad. I don't think they will ever do anything like that. But I've been wrong before.

2006, the year of the Linux desktop?

[wysiwia]

wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?

Does anybody know why? Read http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005. pdf

Or a possible solution? Read http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/54009/index.h tml

O. Wyss

"When Linux is ready"

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Could the author explain why Linux isn't ready for office use? In my opinion it's been "ready" for several years, and only getting better. (And no snarky comments about lack of games, that doesn't apply to an office environment)

Re:"When Linux is ready"

[BenjyD]

A decent office suite would be a start.

Re:"When Linux is ready"

[IntergalacticWalrus]

A decent office suite would be a start.

Then please do tell us why OpenOffice 2 isn't "decent".

Re:"When Linux is ready"

[BenjyD]

OO.org2 has got a lot better, but I still found it easier to fire up VMWare and use Office 2003, mostly for Excel and some Word. Office 2003 is quicker, has an easier interface, fewer bugs and of course better Office file format compatibility. As a word processor, I actually prefer Pages overall, although Office 12 looks pretty good.

The existence of OO is important, of course, as competition for MS, and it has some nice features (print to PDF etc). In my experience, OO2 is somewhere around "Office 96.5" - pretty good, but clunky and quirky with some odd bugs.

Standards and why vendors are being stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

>I wholeheartedly agree. This industry needs open standards implemented and enforced -- now.

The standards are there, the problem is, everyone has their own standard, open or not, and the proprietaryware makers have nothing to gain by the implementing open standards, or so they believe.

The vendors are the ones that need to adopt a standard. They need only to look at HTML to see what it can do for them. I can think of no reason why all office docs aren't xml yet. MS needs to ditch the VBA crap, or open the spec for VBA so other people can build interpereters.

-AC

My point in the talk...

[luge]

... was that 'the year of the linux desktop' will be different years for different people. For me, the year was 1998; for lots of people, it might well be 2018. But they can move that date forward by choosing open standards. The longer they keep using proprietary standards the further away the year of the linux desktop (or the year of the mac desktop, or year of $YOUR_OS_HERE) is for them.

A good book to recommend about "open"

[ylikone]

A very good book with many essays on the application and importance of open standards and open source is Open Sources 2.0 : The Continuing Evolution. Check it out if you are interested in researching more of what some experts have to say about this.

The list of essays are:
1. The Mozilla Project: Past and Future by Mitchell Baker
2. Open Source and Proprietary Software Development by Chris DiBona
3. A Tale of Two Standards by Jeremy Allison
4. Open Source and Security by Ben Laurie
5. Dual Licensing by Michael Olson
6. Open Source and the Commoditization of Software by Ian Murdock
7. Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process by Matthew N. Asay
8. Under the Hood: Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context by Stephen R. Walli
9. Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur by Russ Nelson
10. Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics by Wendy Seltzer
11. Libre Software in Europe by Jesus M. Gonzalez-BarahonaGregorio Robles
12. OSS in India by Alolita Sharma and Robert Adkins
13. When China Dances with OSS by Boon-Lock Yeo, Louisa Liu, and Sunil Saxena
14. How Much Freedom Do You Want? by Bruno Souza
15. Making a New World by Doc Searls
16. The Open Source Paradigm Shift by Tim O'Reilly
17. Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development by Pamela Jones
18. Open Source Biology by Andrew Hessel
19. Everything Is Known by Eugene Kim
20. The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir by Larry Sanger
21. Open Beyond Software by Sonali K. Shah
22. Patterns of Governance in Open Source by Steven Weber
23. Communicating Many to Many by Jeff Bates and Mark Stone
Appendixes :
A. The Open Source Definition
B. Referenced Open Source Licenses
C. Columns from Slashdot

When Linux is ready *for you*

[luge]

What I said in the talk (and I think got lost for perfectly understandable reasons of brevity on the part of the reporter) was that Linux is not ready for everyone yet. It was ready for me in 1998 (so that was the year of the linux desktop for me); it was ready for my girlfriend probably mid-2004 sometime, so that was the year of the linux desktop for her, and for Novell internally. It is certainly ready for some businesses now (as Novell proves), and has been for years, but others need any of a number of things- better usability from open office, perhaps, or better manageability when thrown at 1000 machines at a time, to give an example that had a lot of relevance when I was at Novell. For every business the reasons to be ready or not are different. So my point was not 'switch now! it is ready now!', which will always cause some people to point to their private reason not to switch, and then stop listening, but rather 'switch when you're ready, and before that, use open standards now to help you get ready to switch.

Re:When Linux is ready *for you*

[cyborg_zx]

I think what most linux advocates are doing is seeing the comment, "linux is ready for X", as implying linux is just about becoming a proper OS whilst Windows has been stomping all over its ass forever. What is forgotten is that there's a hump one must climb beyond your opponent if you want to overcome the inertia against change.

The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[twitter]

From the Fine Article:

Condemning people for not using Linux instead of Windows, and the strong-arm tactics of some proprietary software makers that try to lock people into a certain product, are just two sides of the same coin.

I wonder if she would consider me irrational for saying that free software is overwhelmingly superior to Microsoft? That's M$'s FUD machine working as planned. It's the end result of a lot of Astroturfing and it's time to put a stop to it.

Tina has bought into a lot of FUD to say and think like that. The condemnation she senses is an overwhelming opinion of the technical and moral superiority of free software. There is really no comparing the two experiences anymore and anyone who uses well configured free software for their primary desktop for more than a month will agree. Saying so is not a condemnation of the user and I've never actually seen anyone be ugly about it. Microsoft has done an admirable job of convincing people that making such a judgement call makes someone into a "Zealot" or a fanatic, or some other insulting word for irrational person. It's their most effective FUD. It conditions Windows users to distrust free software users and creates self censorship in the less confident free software user. Like all lies, it blows up in their face when the user escapes.

The only time I've seen people angry is when they first realize how badly they have been lied to. It passes as they get used to their new, stable system. People who have never fallen into the trap feel no such anger. I've never seen an angry Mac, Solaris or Linux user, so the source of such irrational behavior must be Microsoft.

Linux has been ready and now it's better. It's been better in many ways for about ten years. Today, it's better in just about every way. From CUPS to Unreal Tournament, things just work. The only people who don't know that are people who don't use it. I don't have to be smug or angry about this. It's just an overwhelming and unavoidable fact.

How could it not be? XP is five years old and Vista promisses little more than massive bloat. At this point, Microsoft's inability to compete with the free software model is obvious. They don't have the manpower to fix things and their model does not care.

Insults are all Microsoft has left.

It's time to stop pretending there is any comparison between Microsoft's unstable, feature starved, inconsistent, single screen system and a modern free software distribution. Free software is technically superior and that superiority has worked it's way down to ease of installation and use. Self censorship does not prove your rationality, it proves that you have been bullied.

You got the number wrong.

[Spy der Mann]

(Disclaimer: This post is a joke)

wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?

Here, lemme fix it for you.

wait, so 2060 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?

There ya go! Looks better now, doesn't it? :-P

Re:Stick toMS products -- stay cool and be HAPPY!

[advocate_one]

If you stick with a known supplier of quality products, such as Microsoft, you can sit back and relax. Go with open sores stuff and who knows when they'll get a real job and quit doing their hobby?

you can't sit back and relax with Microsoft... didn't you know, you have to bend over, grasp your ankles and brace... and don't forget the upgrade treadmill... who else would call their own customers dinosaurs for sticking with Office 97. It's Office 97 users being ridiculed in those commercials... their own customers, whose only fault is sticking with a version of Office that fits their needs. Apparently Microsoft didn't make it buggy enough for the customers to want to upgrade...

All of this is rather silly

[Eskarel]

I always see these arguments, and I always see people missing the point. I like open source, I like open standards, but I also live in the real world and can see things from the perspective of the business I work for.

Open Office is improving all the time, some of the components(I only really use word processing) are almost as good as the Microsoft equivilants. The document format is standard and can be replicated by any application which wants to do so.

However, it hasn't been, you can't just open an Open Office document, you have to install Open or Star Office, or possibly some other freeware application. Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard.

If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it. If you send them an OpenOffice document, odds are they won't be able to open it. The purpose of these sorts of files is to store and transfer data, if the person I'm sending that document to can't open it, then it doesn't matter whether the file is open or closed, because it has no practical purpose.

You can argue about the value of open standards till you're blue in the face, but if everyone can't open it without substantial effort(downloading a 100 meg file is substantial effort), if they can't edit it without substantial effort, then it doesn't have any value at all.

You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.

Re:All of this is rather silly

[Blakey Rat]

You could design a language which was perfect, which had no exceptions to rules, which allowed for no ambiguity or misunderstanding, which was, in every way you can measure such a thing, perfect, but if no one speaks it it doesn't make any difference at all.

Just say Esperanto, you're not insulting anybody here. :)

But yes, I agree with you. Added to that, Word documents have features that OpenDoc doesn't have specifications for. It's interesting that Microsoft (if I remember correctly) has joined the OpenDoc committee because maybe working together with the OpenOffice folks they can come up with a file format that supports all the Word features, all the OpenOffice features, and is still backwards-combatible with either OpenOffice or Word. It'll be a challenge and a half, though.

Re:All of this is rather silly

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard. If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it.

First, I disagree with your characterization of the state of the industry/computing world. If someone sends a Word file somewhere the other person might be able to open it. Many will have Word, at least in the US. In other countries that is much less likely. Even if they do have Word, they may or may not be able to open the document, depending upon the version. Often it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is no guarantee that in 10 years the same file will be able to be opened using any software available. Right now, very old Word files are sometimes nearly impossible to open with any program.

This is a problem. Open Standards are a solution. There are many very good reasons for companies, governments, and other large organizations that plan to be around for more than a decade to switch to open standards. Archiving is one of them. There are simultaneously some good reasons to switch to a free office suite (namely $200 a seat). Change is always difficult and it is made more-so by MS specifically working to make it hard. That in itself is another reason to change. When you are someone's customer and they are specifically trying to make things hard for you, it is obvious they don't value you and you are likely to get abominable service from them. Between the cost and the functionality I think a lot of people are looking to change, and if they aren't at least investigating, they are ripe for being slaughtered by more nimble competitors. I get OpenOffice files from co-workers and even from some partners. They aren't as common as .doc files yet, but the tide is turning. I can tell a partner or large customer in Argentina to download OpenOffice if they want to edit our files, and they can use it for .doc files too. I can't tell them to buy copies of Word and expect it to happen in a timely manner. Schools can use a version of OpenOffice and be confident that students can read the same files at home. They can't be so confident with Word and they can't tell everyone to buy a copy of some particular version.

Between schools, foreign companies, and government agencies adopting the open office standard, no one will be able to afford not being able to read it, and since it is free OpenOffice will start to be bundled with home systems. There will be plug-ins for Word and eventually MS will try to embrace and extend the format. That will be the real challenge, but I don't doubt that it is coming.

Re:All of this is rather silly

[Eskarel]

First, I'm talking about businesses, not individuals, or schools, neither of which have a monetary incentive to make sure their stuff is readable. According to TFA businesses were the target of this whole thing to start with. As a side note btw, the Corporate Office license is a hell of a lot more than $200 a seat, and businesses are still more than willing to pay for it.

Second, having an open standard does not actually ensure that people will be able to read the document 10 years down the line, because it doesn't ensure that anyone will bother to make something which can read it 10 years down the line. It simply means that, IF the standard is still available, and IF you have a team of qualified programmers(or enough money to hire someone elses), you can get one made, MAYBE without having to pay for a license(open standard doesn't mean free).

That's a whole lot of if's and maybes.

I know it's a cardinal sin to say this, but the open source revolution is NOT coming. To your average user, aside from price(and to be honest in today's society the average user is much more likely to pirate something they know than use a free equivilant they don't), there is no substantial reason to switch, and may reasons not to. I use linux, I like linux, but I use it mostly because it's fun for me, not because it actually offers me anything much I can't get otherwise.

Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[Blakey Rat]

You can do more with Office on Windows or Macintosh than you can with OpenOffice on Linux, and they're more integrated with the OS to boot.

You might not use the features in Office that OpenOffice doesn't have, but that doesn't mean that nobody uses them. Where I work, I constantly come across documents that use Word's revision tracking. It's not something I use, but it's an extremely handy feature that, frankly, OpenOffice doesn't do well.

Yes, Office 2007 formats are open standards

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Dismiss the other replies to your post saying that Office 2007 formats are "XML but not standard", as they post out of willfull ignorance. :-)

Office 2007 formats (aka OpenXML) are not the same as Office 2003 XML (which weren't standards recognized by an independent body). OpenXML is open and is going through the ECMA process right now.

http://openxmldeveloper.org/default.aspx is the home page of the organization pushing the standard. The founding members of this organization (shown here http://openxmldeveloper.org/archive/2006/03/18/Ope nXmlDeveloperGroup.aspx) include Microsoft (of course), Apple, Intel, other tech companies, businesses, some government entities, libraries, researchers). OpenXML is the default format for Office 2007, but you do not need Office 2007 to read, write, manipulate documents stored as OpenXML, in fact the site that I cite has examples of Java code tht manipulates the formats.

Microsoft is betting that they can compete on features rather than document format "lock-in", which many here have preached is the only reason for MS Office's dominance.

Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[I'm Don Giovanni]

Ignorance, thy name is "twitter".

Re:best reason to use open standards...

[Jaqui]

That s a good thing.
less attachments, less malware spreading.

I filter html formatted email to the spam pile, just based on the message format.
and I never look at the spam pile, it's junk I don't want.

I do currently get over 600 emails a day, with very few spam messages.
and it's rare that I get an attachment that is not plain text.
{ MS doesn't support Open Document Format, and has stated they won't ]
The few attachments I do get are usually patches.

Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for you, you sound like the very negative, holier-than-thou "everyone is ignorant and I'm right" people she's talking about. It's great of you to insult her and call her ignorant because you don't agree with what she's saying. Way to go.

Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[kbielefe]

Do you mean that OpenOffice doesn't handle Word document revision tracking well or that OpenOffice doesn't handle revision tracking of its own documents well?

If the former, then you just made a great case against Microsoft Office file format and for open document standards.

If the latter, I find nothing lacking in OpenOffice's revision tracking. Although, I'm not familiar enough with Microsoft's implementation to make a fair comparison.

Re:The Reporter, Ignorant. Self Censorship, Bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if she would consider me irrational for saying that free software is overwhelmingly superior to Microsoft?

Well, ROTFLMAO and all that, what the hell do you think?

What a hoot. Where do you people come from, anyway?