Una iniziativa forse importante a cui partecipare. pc -------- Messaggio Originale -------- Oggetto: [geo-discuss] on Open Formats Data: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:59:46 -0700 Da: Jo Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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, > 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 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 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. cheers, jo _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss -- Paolo Cavallini, see: http://www.faunalia.it/pc
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