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

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: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: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.