Hi Bryan,
Good to hear from ya.
As such, in my professional endeavors, I've had to differentiate between
more than just "open" and "proprietary." In fact, the two terms are so
broad and non-differentiating I despise them (much like I despise the
common two views in American politics only being "liberal" or
"conservative").
The broader term "open", as related to IT, unfortunately was hijacked in
the early 80's by Unix companies as "open systems" that were in fact
nothing of the kind. It's been very hard to undo that damage, even with
the reasonably well-defined concept of "open source".
It's really about "mitigating risk" to those investments -- such as data --
that an organization has made, something
that can be easily both qualified and quantified in metric.
I must say that I also get queasy on the use of the term "risk", which
has often been used against open source. Too often I've seen the term
"risk" associated with "fear of the unknown".
I would disagree with you in the sense that IMO there is no such thing
as "unmaintainable open source".
Unmaintained? Sure -- there are plenty of orphaned projects around. But
none are "unsupportable" -- the very nature of open source allows its
code to be picked up and moved forward by anyone who wants to do so.
One of the best ways to guarantee that a standard -- be it a network
interface, an API, a file format, or something else -- is open, is to
have at least one open source implementation. That guarantees that the
standard can never be kidnapped. If the source is open, the 'standards'
it uses cannot -- by definition -- be closed. If OpenOffice wants to
read and write the AbiWord native file format, there's nothing the Abi
developers can do to stop that -- and vice versa.
Please offer a concrete example of what your article calls "sourceware"
(open source, closed standard). I would suggest that it doesn't exist,
because it _can't_.
As such, I thought I'd bring them up here for reading, possibly
agreement/disagreement, but more in the hope of giving you'all something
to "sell" your clients/customers on (especially those in the US who have
been wrongly told "open source" is like "communism," of which it is not
-- at least not until it's mandated**).
Well, whether Americans like it or not, there _is_ more than shred of
Marxist philosophy behind the GPL concept of "forced sharing". Whether
the connection is deliberate or not can be debated, but the similarity
is hard to dispute. In 2000 I wrote in a ZDNet column (which they've
deleted):
"The general belief in "sharing is good, hoarding is bad" as a truism
owes more to religion or spirituality than to any logic or observation.
After all, Richard Stallman wasn't the first to decry the hoarding of
private property as a social ill -- the concept is well-explained in
Karl Marx's 1846 work, The German Ideology. Many of the problems
identified in Marx's work are echoed in much of the writings related to
GNU philosophy. For instance, Marx stated that hoarding private property
was against the good of the people, and this is exactly what Stallman
says about the hoarding of software."
Now, it's absolutely insane to equate Marxism to Stalinist or Maoist (or
Kim-Jong-Il-ist) Communism, but even the link with Marx is enough to
make some US red-baiters' blood boil.
Personally, I would not want to mandate open source but I _would_ want
to mandate open standards, as much as a consumer issue as anything else.
I've recently written about this issue myself, in commenting on the
skirmish between OpenDocument and Microsoft:
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/ComputerCanada/News.asp?id=42100
How's this related to LPI? Not much. But things have been quiet here
lately anyway...
- Evan
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