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

anthony baldwin photodharma at gmail.com
Sun May 10 12:11:47 UTC 2009


Graham Todd wrote:
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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

Thanks for this.
This, to me, is of utmost importance: Standards, especially in respect 
to file formats and their interoperability across platforms and 
applications.
If all file formats were routinely and strictly standardized, I would 
care less what platform or software others used, since, said 
standardization would preserve my freedom of choice to collaborate with 
others regardless of platform or application.


/tony

-- 

http://www.photodharma.com
art & photos | tony baldwin

http://www.uuchaliceart.com
Unitarian Universalist art.





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