http://www.osnews.com/story/5293/Cooperation_by_Standards_in_a_Diverse_World Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:05:03 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? At least under Epiphany, your sample XML document doesn't show correctly.

-Erwos Wed, 03 Dec 2003 04:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Shows well here under Epiphany-1.0.6 Wed, 03 Dec 2003 04:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In order to help these users, open source application developers developed standards for graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

I notice that standards here is plural, why? Because the OSS community has no single standard for desktop enviroments, GUI toolkits, package managers, etc. But still after all this, they're constantly bitching about standards.
How does the saying go? Before the OSS community points out the gnat in somebody else's eye, perhaps they should deal with the camel in their own eye. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 04:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The sample XML doesn't show up in Mozilla 1.3 either. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It works fine now. If it doesn't, use another browser as it is probably the browser's bug. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I notice that standards here is plural, why? Because the OSS community has no single standard for desktop enviroments, GUI toolkits, package managers, etc. But still after all this, they're constantly bitching about standards.

There are standard desktop environments. KDE and GNOME.

There are standard GUI toolkits. GTK and QT

There are standard package managers. RPM, APT, Portage

The article mentions more open standards you are free to use.

Who's bitching now? Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The whole point of having a "standard" is to have ONE that is well documented and "free" to use in any way. You always mention two to three stuff on each category.

Who's bitching now? Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Note: Please note that the author is not a native English speaker, so please excuse any grammar mistakes.

English is my native language and I still can not write that well. :-) Darn public schools. Blam it on the chicago edu system. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The whole point of having a "standard" is to have ONE that is well documented and "free" to use in any way. You always mention two to three stuff on each category.

Experience teaches us there is no ONE right way of doing things. I don't know which standard you refer to that is not well documented and free, in open source.

Only proprietary standards are licensed and closed as far as I know. And only proprietary standards enforce ONE and only ONE way of doing things. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Can you please watch your language? Swearing is forbidden by the forum rules.
Here are the forum rules in case you need a refresher:
http://www.osnews.com/rules.php
Item #1: No bad mouthing or cursing. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Only proprietary standards are licensed and closed as far as I know. And only proprietary standards enforce ONE and only ONE way of doing things.

Duh, having only one way of doing things is what makes something a standard. Imagine if companies were to release CD players, each with their own standard. Who cares if they were open standards? I say it's better to have one.

There are standard desktop environments. KDE and GNOME.
There are standard GUI toolkits. GTK and QT
There are standard package managers. RPM, APT, Portage
The article mentions more open standards you are free to use

I think you are mixing words here, because none of what you mention are actually standards.
A standard is not program, a toolkit, or a package manager. If they were, you could say that MS Word is a standard. (Well, it is a 'defacto' standard, but not a standard in the literal sense.)

I define a standard as some sort of RFC or other document that describes in detail how something should work, and then everyone builds products around that standard.
For example, a standard for package managers might be a document that explains (amoung other things) the xml (or whatever) file layout that package mangers would use to describe the packages that were install on a system, and then apt, RPM, etc could all use the same file format - THAT would be a standard. But this kind of thing where you build a toolkit, a DE, or whatever and calling it a standard is just wrong.

What you have instead is a bunch of free and open tools, not standards. And IMHO, that is what the OSS community really wants is for everything to be free and open ... for companies like MS to create file formats and just hand it to them on a silver platter, so that they could create tools that would compete directly with MS. Yeah, that would make a lot of business sense for MS to do something like that.

While I agree that it would be fantabulous if every app and file format was open source, but we don't live in a perfect world. And in the imperfect world we live in, there is room for both open and closed models. WIth some people who care mainly about money while others are more idealistic, there has to be room for both. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 06:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I can't seem to find the moderate button for your comment, there is some problem with this site. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 06:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I do not consider the word "bitching" that bad to be worthy of moderation. Maybe it is a difference of how we perceive the word as I am not an english speaker. And please stop the baiting. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 06:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Really needs to do something in the standards department

It is lacking, it is needed it will solve of 90% of our hassles. For instance the stupid RPM fiasco has just got to stop. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 06:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? RPM's work it's that there are two major problems with them IMHO.

1st - Binary compatibility needs to stop being broken after every major release with some distro's.

2nd - Repositories need to be made and kept updated with the latest software.

For free distro's RPM's can be made to work seamlessly with installation tools like Open Carpet, urpmi, or APT/Synaptic. The problem lays with commercial distro's that constantly change things around as to break RPM compatibility within their own RPM package format. Not to mention the hassle of either waiting for updates to repositories or finding a new repository for packages with these commercial distros. Again with free distro's RPM's can be made to work and work well as a delivery method for applications. There are both command line and gui tools out there that more then meet the needs and specifications to deal with the dependency problems that one faces with the manual installation of rpm's. It's just that repositories need to be kept updated and binary compatibility needs to be foremost in the minds of distro makers, especially commercial ones. In fact I'd say that RPM is one standard that does work it's just that people/distro makers screw up in the execution of delivery of RPM's to their end-users in most cases. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 07:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? While I agree that it would be fantabulous if every app and file format was open source, but we don't live in a perfect world. And in the imperfect world we live in, there is room for both open and closed models. WIth some people who care mainly about money while others are more idealistic, there has to be room for both.

Open source != Open standard #OK.

I assume you are not a programmer, so I will give an example that you can understand. Image, you brought and ford tarus and one day your tires go flat. you write down the measurement of the tire (70/175 D 28 3/9) and go down to your local tire shop to have it replace. All you see are 175/70 R 14, 175/70 R 15, etc... You find out ford tarus uses non-standard tires and the only way to replace them is through your local ford dealer (lock in).

Lucky the auto industry uses standard parts so the next time you or I have a flat, thank God we have open standards. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 08:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Some things I don't quite agree with:

"Unlike home user, which prefers a rich visual design, skins and new ways to interact with the applications, business users require a simple interface, clean, easy to use and similar to the other applications which are already known by employees. They don't have time to admire new designs and figure out how to use them, and want instead to fulfill their tasks as efficient as possible."

This is a myth. The home user IS the business user. These aren't two classes of people, they are one and the same. Business users don't just disappear into thin air after they leave the office at 5 pm. They go home and become "home-users". They both use the same applications: email, reading and writing documents (using MS Office) and browsing web.
At the office there might be a few company specific applications that have no use in the home environment but that's it.

Also: "The user" doesn't prefer to skins and doesn't prefer rich visual design. Why not? Because he/she only knows Windows. The same OS used both at home and in the office. The user (since we are generalizing ) doesn't use skins because he/she doesn't know they exist (the usefulness of skins themselves is another discussion).

As for some of the standards mentioned: it is always nice to hope for the best (don't we all?), but reality is usually different.

PNG isn't widely used, despite being around for some years already.
JPEG and BMP are the standards people use.

SVG is the same. No user-base of any real magnitude, eventhough it had a lot of support from Adobe from the outset.

Theora I'm sure is a nice project, but for all its it has no chance of competing with MPEG4 and other established formats.

And don't forget that however nice PDF documents are for interchange, they cannot be edited in any meaningful way (yes I know about the "edit" features the viewer has. They don't cut it as PDF does not retain the document flow).

Overall, not a bad article, but it could have used a tad more realism. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 10:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There is a large debate at the moment about POSIX v Linux Standards Base (LSB). The LSB folks have effectively developed a competing standard, for which there is specific technical justification. LSB is being standardised by ISO. This is just a waste of time as POSIX is already well established, covers the subject matter, and so on. So in this case, LSB folks look like they pulling a microsft / proprietary stunt: using the sheer following of Linux to push through a standard that doesn't need to be there. It would be far more effective if LSB worked with POSIX for a common outcome. The entire industry (including Linux) would win. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 12:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Duh, having only one way of doing things is what makes something a standard. Imagine if companies were to release CD players, each with their own standard. Who cares if they were open standards? I say it's better to have one.

Not exactly. Standards exist to guide you not to command you. Take a look at how many standard programming languages there are. Going by your logic, we should just write code in ONE language.

I think you are mixing words here, because none of what you mention are actually standards.

They are well known. They are popular. They are used by majority of entities including large corporations. They are supported by major if not all vendors. They are accepted among the community as criteria for measuring compatibility, integration and usage. These make them standards to me. I'm not mixing words, you are reading too much into the meaning of a standard.

A standard is not program, a toolkit, or a package manager. If they were, you could say that MS Word is a standard. (Well, it is a 'defacto' standard, but not a standard in the literal sense.)

Aren't you contradicting yourself here. MS Word is a standard but it's not a standard? Besides, you brought up toolkits, package manager and DEs, not me.

I define a standard as some sort of RFC or other document that describes in detail how something should work, and then everyone builds products around that standard.

While your definition is theoretically sound, in practice a standard in anything that widely accepted and agreed upon by a community of users. There are thousands of RFCs that would never see the light of the day. Only the popular, widely used and widely accepted RFCs *might* become standards.

Your theories are fascinating but we live in the real world.

For example, a standard for package managers might be a document that explains (amoung other things) the xml (or whatever) file layout that package mangers would use to describe the packages that were install on a system, and then apt, RPM, etc could all use the same file format - THAT would be a standard. But this kind of thing where you build a toolkit, a DE, or whatever and calling it a standard is just wrong.

Oh, yes. Exactly my point. There are such standard. *nix developers know /etc, should contain configuration files, /lib should contain libraries, /bin should contain executable binaries, /home is reserved for users and so on.

If I'm not mistaken the LSB is responsible for such framework. Most *standard* package managers adhere partially to them. Many of the LSB policies are not popular because many people don't like their restriction. e.g RPMs being the defacto package manager and so on. A revision of some of these policies needs to be considered if they are to be taken seriously. Otherwise some of the LSB policies will be one of those thousands of RFCs that failed to gain popularity and failed to become standards.

Needless to say, their are standards, and they are being followed.

What you have instead is a bunch of free and open tools, not standards. And IMHO, that is what the OSS community really wants is for everything to be free and open ... for companies like MS to create file formats and just hand it to them on a silver platter, so that they could create tools that would compete directly with MS. Yeah, that would make a lot of business sense for MS to do something like that.

Then don't bitch when you can't open a word document in anything but MSOffice.

While I agree that it would be fantabulous if every app and file format was open source, but we don't live in a perfect world. And in the imperfect world we live in, there is room for both open and closed models. WIth some people who care mainly about money while others are more idealistic, there has to be room for both.

Home users, educational institutions, charitable organisations, corporate entities, you and I will benefit the most if open standards are pushed and adopted. Open standards means anyone and everyone can compete on open and fair grounds. Open standards, doesn't mean having ONE toolkit, ONE desktop env, ONE package manager, ONE browser or ONE way of doing things.

There could be multiple ways of doing things. And as long as their open and free, those ways of doing things can work well together. User benefit in the end. Standards change with time, they are not static. And standards should never force users into doing things in only ONE way. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 12:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It doesn't matter what "standards" the world uses. It's true that BMP and JPeg are the most popular picture formats, but the open source community needs to push open formats rather than settling for what everyone else is using. When someone starts using Linux (or any OS-O/S), they expect everything to be Free in all senses of the word. Also, the speed at which OS programs and technologies improve is reason enough to stand behind them. If they aren't the best of breed yet, they will be soon.

The image file types are trivial anyway, since open and closed programs support most formats under the sun.

I'm a bit suprised the writer mentioned FLACK and not Xvid, I haven't used Flack yet, but Xvid has been around for awhile and has similar performance to Divx. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not FLAC, Theora. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The point with LSB, is simply that it is an extension to POSIX for the most part.

Having an LSB-compliant Linux distro doesn't mean that my Kernel threading is not POSIX compliant.

There are some areas of POSIX which, in hindsight, are not perfect. There are some which suit large scale old Unices, but are unsuitable for the direction of Linux, and that is alright too.

LSB can be seen as taking the best bits of POSIX and fixing most of the worse bits.

The old RPM debate can carry on ad nauseum, but to be frank, it needed to mention packaging in some way, and modern RPM implementations are satisfactory. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 14:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It looks like we can't agree on what a standard is. How can we define any standards without deciding on the definition of a "standard"? This seems to me to be the first order of business here. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 15:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? We wouldn't want to make any standards, then Linux would be easier to use, and then we couldn't have our secret handshake club anymore. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "LSB can be seen as taking the best bits of POSIX and fixing most of the worse bits. "

Isn't that like saying unix was wrong? Wed, 03 Dec 2003 16:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Read the current debates on POSIX mailing lists. It is clear that POSIX folk are open and willing to adapt and work with LSB, on the other hand, LSB seem to maintain a more arrogant attitude that they need to be different.

Standards are about a bit of give and take, some imperfection (especially trying to maintain a consistent standard for so many years, etc). Just think of all the inconsistency that POSIX had to deal with when it first harmonised vendor proprietary standards.

It's just depressing: LSB will standardise, then there will be these niggling portability differences.
10 years ago, it was: #if __SYSV__ #elif __BSD__
In 5 years it will be: #if __POSIX__ #elif __LSB__

That just sucks. Now is time to prevent it from happening. Yet the Linux folk are doing exactly what the Microsoft folk are doing: we're bigger and more powerful, we can do it our way, tough luck.

This is not what the spirit of Linux and Open Source is about. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 19:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OGG Theora and XVid are not exactly interchangable. OGG Theora will have features which are impossible with XVid. One i'm aware of, which is why i'll use OGG Theora, is that OGG Theora can be used for live streaming of video over the internet - essentially being an alternative for the proprietary, closed-source RealPlayer. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 21:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not exactly. Standards exist to guide you not to command you. Take a look at how many standard programming languages there are. Going by your logic, we should just write code in ONE language.

As I see it, standards are there to command you, in order to make sure that everybody is compatible with everybody else. By your logic, if standards were only there to guide you, the docs would say something like: "Well, this is a standard, but if you don't like it, just do your own thing. You may not be compatible with those who follow the standard, but choice is good ..."

While your definition is theoretically sound, in practice a standard in anything that widely accepted and agreed upon by a community of users.

Alright, so how many people (or percentage of people) have to use it before something is considered a standard ? If I build an app and 10 people use it, is it then a standard?

Home users, educational institutions, charitable organisations, corporate entities, you and I will benefit the most if open standards are pushed and adopted. Open standards means anyone and everyone can compete on open and fair grounds.

There could be multiple ways of doing things. And as long as their open and free, those ways of doing things can work well together.

True, but having open standards (and I use the term 'standards' loosely here) does not benefit greedy big businesses who want the playground all to themselves. And since this is the only group that really matters, it makes no difference whatsoever whether end users benfit or not. End users aren't the ones with all the money so in the grand scheme of things, they're really not all that important, as long as they keep feeding the corporate machine. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 22:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... of success of standards, look no further than GSM.

Europe got its act together to agree on one mobile telephony standard - so now Europe has a phenomenal market, high degree of penetration, seamless roaming across multiple countries, large diversity of handsets and equipment, and so on. Contrast to the United States.

... of failure of standards, look no further than writable DVDs.

Multiple manufacturers couldn't agree - releasing numerous writable standards rather than agreeing on one: confusing the market. In the UK, the consumers association last year prior to Christmas warned consumers of the danger of these incompatible and possibly short-to-live standards, and berated the industry for causing the problem. Wed, 03 Dec 2003 23:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Are you kidding me, cell phones here more expensive than in the USA where practically give you the phone for free, same goes for call prices. Just compare the prices on amazon.com to those on amazon.co.ok. Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Just compare the quality of phones and features though. What you get for the US non-GSM market is crap. It's little wonder they are giving them away to attract customers - and pricing the services higher as a result. Take a look at the whole picture dude. Thu, 04 Dec 2003 11:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments