__/ [ Ray Ingles ] on Wednesday 17 May 2006 15:39 \__
> On 2006-05-16, 7 <website_has_email@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> "Customers do not opt for open source applications because of
>>> 'quasi-religious beliefs' that their openness is better than
>>> proprietary alternatives, he argued, but because of their features.
> [...]
>> Users are drawn to open source because openness is a feature of
>> open source software.
>
> Right. People weren't drawn to ASCII because it was a particularly
> better standard (though it did have a few nice features) but because it
> was an *open* standard.
I quite like that statement. I looked at the ASCII table this morning (due
to some WordPress regex bug) and then thought to myself how screwed up the
world would have been had a whole large set of so-called ASCII's, and
QWERTY's, and WWW's existed.
Think Periodic Table. It's simply a common terminology and classification
that has become a convention. It helps us better communicate and make our
products (or whatever fruits of work) mutually compliant. Imagine yourself
a scientific journals that contains 20 different languages or uses
different words, which oppose one of these IEEE terminological standards.
* A Journal with only English articles is a feature which _sells_
* A Web which works on all platforms is a very powerful feature
* An encyclopedia which can be _corrected_ can become dominant within a
few years (think Wikipedia)
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz
http://Schestowitz.com | Open Prospects ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
3:55pm up 19 days 22:52, 10 users, load average: 0.42, 0.55, 0.53
http://iuron.com - knowledge engine, not a search engine
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