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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.'"
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
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.
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.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
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.
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.
READY.
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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.
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
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
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.
What good is a system if it cannot talk to other systems (programs services etc).
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.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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)
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.
The photos you took of your children growing up won't be viewable on modern equipment.
.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.
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
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.