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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.'"
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.
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...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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
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
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
PRINT ""+-0
Thanks, peabrain. Maybe next time you'll want to excise the subhead before your copy-paste hackjob.
Cripple fight!
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.
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......
--- Duey Finster http://www.dueyfinster.com
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.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
wait, so 2006 ISN'T the year of the desktop linux?
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
sig? Oh, that sig...
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 good is a system if it cannot talk to other systems (programs services etc).
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
The more people who take that stance, the less attachments they'll receive.
http://jfin.org/jFin pure java open source financial library
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.
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.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
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.