Mass. holding tight to OpenDocument

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Incorrect.

Well let's just put that sorry opinion in check Mr. McS.

What MA wants is to ensure accessibilty of their documents using something that they can control. An open or community standard.

Taking some quotes from Bob Sutor:

"A de facto standard is a specification that became popular because everyone just happened to use it, possibly because it was implemented in a product that had significant market acceptance. The details of this specification may or may not be available publicly without some sort of special legal arrangement."

"The basic problem with a de facto standard is that it is controlled by a single vendor who can, and often does, change it whenever the vendor decides to do so. This frequently happens when a product goes from one major version to another. At that point, everyone else who is trying to interoperate with the information created in the owning vendor?s product must scramble and try to make their own software work again."

The other type of standard is again quoting Bob Sutor:

The second kind of standard I?ll mention is something I?ll call a community standard. As you might guess, this is something created and maintained by more than one person or company. The members of the community may work for companies or governments, belong to organizations, or may be experts who are otherwise unaffiliated. The standards creation process involves negotiation, compromises, and agreement based on what it best for the community and the potential users.

"It is a classic fallacy to think that this necessarily creates a ?lowest common denominator? or unsatisfactory compromise. Smart people can make good decisions together, even if they don?t all work for the same company. Conversely, people who all work for the same company don?t necessarily always make smart decisions. They might, for example, produce de facto standards that have security vulnerabilities."

"Community standards usually get blessed, as I termed it above, by being created or submitted to a Standards Development Organization, or SDO. While it does happen that people may get together and write a standard from scratch in an SDO, it is very likely that one or more parties will bring drafts to the table as a starting point. It is usually expected that the developing standard will change over time as more minds are directed at the problem that the standard is expected to help solve."

"A standard may go through multiple versions: it is not uncommon for the first version to take one to two years and then about the same time for each of the next one or two iterations. At some point it will stabilize and either become fairly universally used or else become eclipsed by an alternative way of tackling the same general problem. For example, the new web services standards are starting to be used for distributed computing, replacing older standards, as Service Oriented Architecture becomes more broadly deployed."

Reference:

http://www.sutor.com/newsite/essays/e-OsVsOss.php

Posted by: gotitright   Posted on: 07/06/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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