Standards (was Re: The future of Ubuntu Linux.... Will it make Micro$oft go bankrupt?)

[Graham Todd]

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On Sun, 10 May 2009 09:00:04 +0800
Chan Chung Hang Christopher <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:

> 3) some serious  'standard' integration between user management and 
> other stuff like mailboxes, sip address, whatever you can tie into
> your user account and tools to manage those settings.
[snipped]

As far as I am aware, Ubuntu is fully standards compliant, and uses the
SIP protocol correctly.  Applications such as OpenOffice, Abiword,
Koffice, etc. use the Open Document Format correctly and this is the
only document format recognised by the International Standards
Organisation (ISO) as a standard AFAIK (though ageing brain cells might
be incorrect here!).  It is still one that Micro$oft have not
universally adopted, and is a recognised standard.

We have all had experience of web pages "designed for Windows" that do
not work properly in Linux.  This is generally because they do not use
the version of HTML internationally recognised as a standard by the W3
Consortium.  And memory (although mine is fading with age) will remind
us of the court case in which Sun stopped Microsoft from using it own
"version" of Java.

Standards are NOT necessarily the formats/applications which Windows
uses, but those adopted by the relevant standards bodies
internationally. I applaud Ubuntu and its variants on maintaining
standards compliance, and I see no reason why Windows does not comply
these standards as a given.  We could have a simpler standard of
compatibility: the output from an application would be standards
compliant, leaving the user to decide which applications he used to
produce that output, confident that it could be universally compatible
if it was compliant to a standard.

So I disagree with Chan over this one part of his posting.
- -- 

Graham Todd
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