City of Vancouver Adopts Open Standards

rbrander writes "Vancouver, Canada's third-largest city, has adopted a policy of 'open standards, interfaces and formats' for all public data. They will also consider open-source software on an even footing with proprietary for all new software purchases. Fifteen of the fifteen people who signed up to speak to city council on the topic spoke in favor. Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."

Comments

One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[vawarayer]

It's good that in tough times, our elected people stop and think outside the box a bit.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[Magic5Ball]

Reverse engineering a binary format from a decade and a half ago is harder than converting old source code into new source code.

That's often a safe assumption, given certain constraints on code quality. But see Quark and Adobe and the choices they made about using legacy code vs. starting over from scratch on apps to read/write their own file formats after periods of cycling entire developer teams every 12-24 months for a couple of years. See my previous point about TIFF/PS/HTML (globally, those are among the most common file formats in current use [faxes, PDFs/printers, internets] and yet we have not achieved consistency in interpreting/writing those formats, despite the fact that they are open in both format and software tools).

Do you really think C will be gone in a couple decades? ;)

C as a language won't go away (nor would most programming languages ever become extinct), but don't count on the dozens of libraries, headers, templates and such that a typical program uses to be maintained into the future. Even now, configure on any moderately sophisticated program or framework (take OpenOffice) can require dozens of minutes to run, and potentially several hours to compile, because of all the version/architecture/configuration/etc interdependencies that need to be resolved, and we have access today to the sourcecodes for every relevant version of the subsystems. Are you confident that you could compile the relevant parts of OpenOffice 1.1.3 to recover some of the swriter table layout details that versions 2 and above handle differently now? From a pair of .ODx files, will a historian 100 years from now be able to figure out which two of the 3800 envelopes were not printed from the congresscritter's mail merge from an early and slightly buggy OpenOffice 2? (These problems are not exclusive to open source, nor are they solved by it.)

From an end-user perspective, I know that there are hundreds of millions of non-PCs out there (cell phones/PDAs, multi-function copiers/printers, digital projectors, etc.) that will successfully open (if not exactly) my Word 95 document, along with dozens (hundreds?) of computer programs on a variety of platforms that do not share a single point of control or failure. I don't know that any one (nor which one) of the current other open or proprietary formats will necessarily gain that much resiliency through massive redundancy that my document will open in 50 years.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[Nefarious Wheel]

The problem with word docs goes beyond business philosophy. Technically the file format is a bit of a mess, and OLAP was it's name oh. It's complex, format piled upon format and probably not well understood (they haven't really improved their office suite materially since Joel Spolsky left, imho).

I do not equate complexity with sophistication, myself, but then I'm just a very old geek and I could be wrong.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[Beardo the Bearded]

C let me buy a house and a car.

I've saved thousands of lives with C.

I love C... and come to think of it, I've spent more time with it than I have with my wife.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[falckon]

In the future, programming will all be in XML, as this is will prove more adaptable to change. Open source software will of course embrace this open extensible language.

for (i=0;i<10;i++)
printf("%d\n", i);

Will be replaced with the following code which is not only much easier to read, and type, but is also adaptable to whatever extra options may be added to for loops over the years.

<for>
<initialization><assignmentvariable="i"><int>0</int></assignment></initialization>
<condition><expression>i<10</expression></condition>
<increment><assignmentvariable="i"><expression>i+1</expression></assignment></increment>
<body>
<output><expression>i</expression></output>
</body>
</for>

Re:It would be nice...

[jpedlow]

Sorry Friend, it's laughable at best. :( The problem is that the provincial government of British Columbia has a branch, called WTS: http://www.sharedservicesbc.gov.bc.ca/Workplace_Technology_Services/supplier.htm these people handle all of the computers on the provincial level. Basically, you've got a lot of hardcore geeks bound by red tape and managers who know nothing about computers in general. (Same old story, right?) Anyway... In the old days, every ministry, say Transport, for example, would have their own admins, their own domain software packages etc. Now it's all under one roof, the problem is that they like old school technology. Ie we have to BEG AND PLEAD to use PHP, ruby etc for interfaces for our databases...prettymuch the problem is, the geeks on hand love open source, but the managers for the whole system have their heads firmly planted up their butts. Thats even the reason why they *just* ramped up to vista instead of waiting for win7 because it'd have "unproven performance". Good game, bureaucracy.

Re:Vancouver is Awesome

[sortius_nod]

Unfortunately, as we can see now, the UK have some serious issues with their politicians flagrantly abusing the system. It really doesn't surprise me that they'd be stupid enough to openly admit they are biased toward Microsoft even though the policy states otherwise.

This really isn't a good example given the current situation in the UK.

VMs

[Mathinker]

A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox. Then no matter how many formats you want to preserve, you only need to deal with constantly porting the VM to current technological standards.

This idea also helps if, for some reason, you prefer to use a proprietary OS and proprietary formats --- however, in that case you are still more likely to run into some bug (a la Y2K38) which you will be much less able to fix compared to the open-source renderer/format case.

I suppose for something like Y2K38 you could just patch the VM to lie about the date, but that isn't going to help if your use scenario requires current date support.

FOSS should not get preference

[symbolset]

It should be required. That's the People's data they're locking up in proprietary formats. It's the People's data they're accessing using the world's only malware ecosystem. We are entitled to expect more.