P Kishor wrote:
"free and open digital standards" is all well and good but a
meaningless concept. Standard for what?
But disagree there. Switching from M$ documents to 'real' open source
documents and dropping licensed graphical data in favour of OSM and other
free map data opens the door to 'Standardising' on something that we can all
cooperate on.
It still is not clear what the "something" is... are you advocating a
standard for a license or a standard for a format? Are you talking
about standards in office-productivity applications (word-processing,
spreadsheet, presentation software) or in databases (should we boycott
everyone who uses Oracle and Ingres?) or remote sensing (does IDL go
out the window?) or medical imaging or audio or video or ... you get
the picture. Let me repeat my question.
Standard for what?
Simply a standard for what we are looking to cooperate on. OSM has a rather
woolly standard for mapping data, it does not cost a penny to obtain it, and
it has a considerable amount of free data behind it. It is evolving and
expanding as needs dictate.
SQL is another area where the 'standard' costs an arm and a leg, but there are
very good implementations to access it that are freely available. If my
customer insists on Oracle then so be it, they pay all the additional costs,
but my open source equivalent - Firebird - would do the same job for my
applications - without the additional costs.
There is no need for the billions spent on ISO. We just need to agree on what
we are doing and publish that information somewhere and cooperate in
maintaining it?
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/lsces/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk//
Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php
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