Tracy R Reed wrote:
[Snip]
I'm pretty sure any such efforts are doomed. It is far easier for a
proprietary software company to change things and cook up new secret
formats than it is for the OSS guys to reverse engineer them so I'm
pretty sure these guys will always be far enough behind as to not
present much competition.
[Snip]
It is always funny when you actually run into a real life physical
example of the collision of OSS efforts and proprietary software company
efforts to scotch any such thing. Remember back when USB was anything
but "universal" well I ran across a old Visioneer 6200 USB scanner
someone wanted to get rid of and I thought, "Oh good, This will just
work with Linux". Well this unit is an example of that time period in
which USB in many instances would only work with Windows '98.
As I recall the story M$ got on the standards committee for USB and made
sure there was a provision that stated that USB is "universal" but
everyone could make their own special method for USB to work under their
own special OS. As I recall it took USB a long time to get to where it
is now.
When I said, "We may live to see...", I actually was reflecting Tracy's
points that it is so hard to get people to choose the right tool for the
job rather than the lemming way which doesn't consider the cliffs ahead.
I just saw a monumental example just last week when someone bought CS
curriculum. No amount of reason was welcome. Thank God for the "Fork" so
we don't (so far) have to really ever end up being forced down any
proprietary path.
rbw
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