Dumb customers and dumber software standards
,----[ Quote ]
| A senior Citigroup techie today called on customers to make their
| voices heard in the debates over software standards - or else.
|
| Skip Snow, enterprise architect at the financial services giant, warned
| that unless more customers get actively involved "we don't stand a chance
| against the vendors".
|
| "For the standards process to really work... the customers need to get
| involved otherwise vendors will continue to give us the lowest common
| denominator for standards," he told an open source and standards panel
| at BEAWorld in San Francisco.
`----
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/09/20/standards_user_participation/
Related:
Proprietary file format lock in
,----[ Quote ]
| This I feel is the greatest problem for people, especially academics
| when wanting to switch to GNU/Linux. Many people in my family work at
| universities in the UK. These people would happily switch to GNU/Linux
| tomorrow if it could run their .doc and other proprietary file formats
| properly.
|
| [...]
|
| So what are these people to do? An option is that the academics install
| GNU/Linux and if they receive a proprietary file format such as .doc
| that they email the people that sent it with a message for them asking
| for the document in a free format. The problem is that academics are
| terribly busy people, especially with the looming RAE. They hardly have
| time to reply to the emails sent with the file in a proprietary format,
| having to ask for files in a free format would be too time consuming.
|
| Since academics don't have time to fight against the norm, which in
| their institutions are proprietary file formats, the only way I see to
| fix this problem is to change the norm. If the norm were to use free and
| open file formats such as the Open Document Format they would not be
| tied into an operating system...
|
| [...]
|
| Not only would moving to free and open file formats give choice of
| operating system back to the academic, it would also mean that the cash
| strapped Universities wouldn't have to shell out on as many licenses for
| products such as MS Office. It could also mean that they themselves could
| switch to operating systems such as GNU/Linux and save money on operating
| system licenses as well as being able to use older hardware for longer
| (with the right distribution of GNU/Linux).
|
| Another reason academic institutions should strongly consider free and
| open file formats is for history's sake...
`----
http://www.libervis.com/proprietary_file_format_lock_in
Timely thread from my inbox:
,----[ Quote ]
| > ALL abstracts are to be presented as Orals - 10 mins + 2 questions:
| > (1) Please confirm your attendance by NOON - Friday, 1 September.
| >
| > (2) Please book yourself a hotel room. Some urls for hotels and guest
| > houses are given at the end of this email.
| >
| > (3) Please let me know if your are vegetarian or have any other
| > dietary requests
| >
| > (4) There is to be a dinner at St John's College the night of 27 Sept.
| > Please note that the college requests that you do not wear jeans or
| > T-shirts.
|
|
| Just to be sure and on the 'safe side', I wanted to ask if projection
| facility will have software that is capable of handling OpenDocument
| format (the ISO standard).
|
| Thanks in advance,
|
| Roy
|
|
| > Roy
| >
| > Can you confirm BY RETURN whether or not you will be here for the
| > 1st day, ie 27th and therefore the dinner?
| >
| > The relevant IT person is still on holiday so I cannot answer your
| > s/ware question. But what do you use to open OpenDocument format
| > (the ISO standard)?
|
| I believe that most office suites such as KOffice and OpenOffice
| (version 2) will be able to open it. I prepare my presentation in
| OpenOffice.
|
| With kind regards,
|
| Roy
`----
Many people are still unware of anything but PowerPoint. So using ODP or
something like XHTML+JS (S5) is still frowned upon and/or leads to
incoveniences. It should not.
|
|
