Comments on: Standards and standarisation http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2006/04/05/standards-and-standarisation/ GStreamer and Collabora news and more Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:31:01 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Chris Hubick http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2006/04/05/standards-and-standarisation/comment-page-1/#comment-326 Chris Hubick Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2006/04/05/standards-and-standarisation/#comment-326 I think it depends on what you want standards for. I value standards which ensure my freedom of choice. If I rely on a piece of software for something critical, and it malfunctions, I either want the ability to fix it myself, or the ability to swap it out for an alternative implementation. In the proprietary software world, having standards is what allows for such interchangeability of implementations. In the Free Software world however, we are generally free to fix problems ourself, so standards may not be of quite such critical importance.<p/>Standards for things such as Binary compatibility are just to save people work having to track a changing ABI. Saving some work isn't a major concern to me, as worst case you just have to upgrade your code yet again.<p/>The scariest scenario to me is some global standard like HTML being coopted so that it would only work in Internet Explorer, and becoming a defacto standard, eventually resulting in a single company like Microsoft being able to control the direction of the entire basis behind our information society (the web), leaving things like Linux (and my freedom of choice) out in the cold.<br/> I think it depends on what you want standards for. I value standards which ensure my freedom of choice. If I rely on a piece of software for something critical, and it malfunctions, I either want the ability to fix it myself, or the ability to swap it out for an alternative implementation. In the proprietary software world, having standards is what allows for such interchangeability of implementations. In the Free Software world however, we are generally free to fix problems ourself, so standards may not be of quite such critical importance.

Standards for things such as Binary compatibility are just to save people work having to track a changing ABI. Saving some work isn’t a major concern to me, as worst case you just have to upgrade your code yet again.

The scariest scenario to me is some global standard like HTML being coopted so that it would only work in Internet Explorer, and becoming a defacto standard, eventually resulting in a single company like Microsoft being able to control the direction of the entire basis behind our information society (the web), leaving things like Linux (and my freedom of choice) out in the cold.

]]> By: Leandro GFC DUTRA http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2006/04/05/standards-and-standarisation/comment-page-1/#comment-327 Leandro GFC DUTRA Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2006/04/05/standards-and-standarisation/#comment-327 You can only standardise sanely when you have a pretty good idea about the field.<p/>For example, SQL was standardised before people understood the relational model for database management. Therefore, it is an unfixable mess which has to be replaced at enormous cost.<br/> You can only standardise sanely when you have a pretty good idea about the field.

For example, SQL was standardised before people understood the relational model for database management. Therefore, it is an unfixable mess which has to be replaced at enormous cost.

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