IBM, Sun to create 'OpenDocument Foundation'?

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Proof positive of the power and utility of open stadards

It is VERY common for competing private firms to form alliances to create common stadards. It has been hapening all along in the various industries.

This is the beauty of it: people are competing in terms of tools that support a standard vs engaging in proprieatary practices to lock customers in for good.

Let's not forget that the Internet relies on stadards that were dynamically formed by the cooporation of academic institutes and industry. IETF ovesees all TCP/IP related standards. W3C oversees the WWW related ones. Or the IEEE 754 Binary Flaating Point Standard.

What happens without standards? In the ol'good days, there used to be SNA (IBM networking), DECnet (DEC Networking), etc. Information was COSTLY and HARD to share. With TCP/IP everyone can talk to each other immediately. The same with floatingpoint numbers: everyone had their own representations, operations, exceptions. Code was producing results without a bound on the differences in the accuracy.

Having a GOOD OPEN document standard will save A LOT OF MONEY and FRUSTRATION in the exchange of private and public documents. This is obviously clear. Imagine electricity transmission over private lines with unknown frequency, phase and voltage and under the control of a SINGLE private firm.

I have no doubt that a proprietary formast maybe amenable to more efficient storage and pre/post processing. However, with recent compression s/w or h/w technmologies this is NOT an issue any more.

As a matter of fact, R/D is needed for the creation of efficient methods for the storage and processing of information as it appplies to the common doc. format.

What is amazing is the 'bravery' of people who would contest in pulic the utility of a standardized document format, in favor that of a single private firm.

What are the PROS of their approach? MS not losing billions in profits? Sheeshhhhhh

-m

Posted by: michael_t   Posted on: 11/01/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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