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Why Amazon's Kindle Should Use Open Standards
Tim O'Reilly wrote in Forbes a while back that he thinks the Kindle only has another two or three years of life left, unless Amazon wises up and embraces open standards. He came to this conclusion, in part, because of his experience deciding how to publish documents on the web back in the mid-1990s.
"You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform. The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser. While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day."
It's this care and passion for creation that makes open standards superior
No, the fact of the matter is that open standards and this anti-commercialism that you speak of is really just a geeks way of saying that they are self indulgent and want to create for themselves. It's the guys at Microsoft and Apple that have to sweat deadlines, do focus groups, sift through the complaints of millions of users, the genuinely work for everyone else. They get paid for it.
Windows is for the people that use it. Mac is for the people that use it. But, Linux is for the people that write it. You can rip me all you want, but just look at all the project managers of various Linux things, and their postings, and the things that strike you is that they are all about "me" first. Stallman, Torvalds, etc, are all pretty self-centered people. Me. Me. Me. This solution is evil, that technology is terrible. Everything to them is black and white. Of course society has a need for such people and we shouldn't throw away open source any more than we should adopt it to the exclusion of all else.
This is my sig.
This is Slashdot, where content creators have ZERO rights, and copyright law is evil...except, of course, when it comes to the GPL. When it comes to the GPL, content creator rights suddenly matter, and copyrights are something to be enforced. The FSF says right on its page that the GPL "assures the copyright of the software," so Slashdot invents a double-standard where they're anti-copyrights and pro-piracy in one case and pro-copyright and anti-piracy in another.
Basically, people choose the self-serving position every time and don't want to lose any free ride. It's kind of sad.
Yeah, I was going to point out too that you could walk. The GP is probably a fat American though.
Yeah, I was going to point out too that you could walk. The GP is probably a fat American though.
I'm not fat and I can bench nearly 300lbs. So you can shove your fat american stereotypes up your starving little third world ass.
If you people actually paid for stuff, you might have an economy.
This is my sig.