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

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

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.
>   
Please read my post again. Where did I say anything about standards. I 
said 'standard' INTEGRATION and note the single quotes.

> 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.
>   
Yawn. I cannot wait for Microsoft and Windows to disappear of the face 
of this planet. Do you have some new point?

> 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.
>   
/me sobs. It is not about standards! It is all about INTEGRATION between 
a 'standard' user account system and other software like dovecot, 
postfix, asterisk, name-your-favourite-service-app. Like everybody using 
mysql or postgresql or ldap or cdb or WHATEVER. Hmm...make that Ubuntu 
using one fixed set data store and a fixed set of metadata whatever they 
might be and all relevant apps using the stuff.

> So I disagree with Chan over this one part of his posting.
>   
The name is Christopher. Just that the Chinese has this odd (to you that 
is) practice of putting
family names first. Nevermind Bond, James Bond. You are free to disagree 
with anything I say but please be clear about what I post before you 
disagree. :-D