"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > During preparation for the DFD I am currently searching for reasons > why open standards are important for end-users.
One analogy that I often find helpful is that of the kitchen appliance. Consider, goes the argument, what happens when something goes wrong with one's toaster. If you feel confident enough to open it up, any toolbox will contain the correct tools: a phillips-head or flat-head screwdriver. These are standards, open ones that anyone can implement without restriction. If one is less confident, or if the problem turns out to be not worth fixing, one can simply go to any store and buy a *different* toaster. Buying a different toaster doesn't require throwing out all one's bread and buying bread from the toaster manufacturer's store; it doesn't mean changing one's electricity supplier because the toaster requires different electricity. No-one would accept the imposition of bread that works only with specific toasters, or electricity that works only with one manufacturer's toaster, so we unconsciously expect that *any* bread maker or electricity supplier will provide bread and electricity that works with any toaster we can buy off the shelf. They are standards, open ones that can be implemented without restriction. Yet in the field of software, somehow we have allowed corporations to sell us exactly this situation: the documents many people use can *only* be used properly with tools from one particular manufacturer, and attempting to switch to tools from a different manufacturer leads to great pain as we convert or discard all our existing documents. Those documents are not in an open, freely-implementable standard format, so the people bear the cost of that lock-in. By demanding open standards in our documents and data formats, we prevent that lock-in and ensure that a free market can supply tools from different manufacturers that we can reasonably expect to work with those open document formats in future. -- \ "Progress might have been all right once, but it's gone on too | `\ long." -- Ogden Nash | _o__) | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
