Jo Walsh wrote: > dear all, > > There has been a bit of discussion in the open source geo community > about the precedent and need for open file formats; partly prompted > by the Samba project's involvement in the European Commision's > antitrust case against Microsoft, on the lack of "interoperability > information". http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070917053717322 > > The question of "open file formats" can be hard to take a public > position on because it can be so implicitly "anti-", provocative of > large companies. Perhaps an Open Format Definition could be a good > place to start, providing a way to think about the problem > constructively. As Lorenzo wrote,
I think this sounds a great idea. One of the lacunaes in the Open Knowledge/Data Definition has always been the fact that item 4. Absence of Technological Restriction refers explicitly to 'open data format' but leaves this undefined. We originally had a dedicated project on the 'open formats/standards' issue entitled the 'Information Accessibility Initiative': http://okfn.org/iai/ This has been rather dormant of late but the wiki (http://okfn.org/iai/wiki) still contains a lot of useful information. I'd also point to Georg Greve's recent post: <http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/an_emerging_understanding_of_open_standards> >> We have the idea there are many formats out there that are largely >> adopted as standards, but they are not, that let theirowners >> act as monopolist. We would like a mature debate ... We should > >> invite companies, institution, universities to collaborate Absolutely, as is written on the IAI home page: "The IAI's aim is to promote awareness and use of open formats to ensure that access to information is not needlessly hampered by technological barriers." > This excerpt IRC dialogue conveys a lot: > > strk: can I make GDAL read DWG ? > FrankW: I would be thrilled, especially if you could > do it without the ODA libraries. > FrankW: You would be a hero! > strk: why can't I ? What's stopping this innovation > which would make me an hero bringing on ? > FrankW: Presumably you aren't willing to spend 10-20 > man years on the effort without funding. > strk: do you see a problem here ? > strk: how man-years would it be if the DWG specs were > available ? > FrankW: Obviously much less. > strk: so, what's this tax on innovation ? > > As Frank put it "open file formats are critical to interoperability > and the open source ecosystem", and collectively we can attempt to > take "pro-competition and pro-interoperability actions" I entirely agree that open formats/standards are an essential necessary condition for interoperability and the health of the open source eco-system however there importance is wider than that as they are also crucial for a healthy and competitive /proprietary/ software/knowledge ecosystem. > I see the draft Open Service Definition work at > http://opendefinition.org/osd/ and i would be interested in setting up > something like it for Open Formats. I would also like to find out who > else is feeling the pain on this, with commonsense to contribute. I think this is a great idea and would happily be a contributor. Perhaps it could be set up at: http://opendefinition.org/ofd/ or (more verbosely) at: http://opendefinition.org/open_format_definition/ ~rufus _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
