Una iniziativa forse importante a cui partecipare.
pc
-------- Messaggio Originale --------
Oggetto: [geo-discuss] on Open Formats
Data: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:59:46 -0700
Da: Jo Walsh <jo@frot.org>
dear all,
There has been a bit of discussion in the open source geo community
about the precedent and need for open file formats; partly prompted
by the Samba project's involvement in the European Commision's
antitrust case against Microsoft, on the lack of "interoperability
information". http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070917053717322
The question of "open file formats" can be hard to take a public
position on because it can be so implicitly "anti-", provocative of
large companies. Perhaps an Open Format Definition could be a good
place to start, providing a way to think about the problem
constructively. As Lorenzo wrote,
We have the idea there are many formats out there that are largely
adopted as standards, but they are not, that let theirowners
act as monopolist. We would like a mature debate ... We should >
invite companies, institution, universities to collaborate
This excerpt IRC dialogue conveys a lot:
strk: can I make GDAL read DWG ?
FrankW: I would be thrilled, especially if you could
do it without the ODA libraries.
FrankW: You would be a hero!
strk: why can't I ? What's stopping this innovation
which would make me an hero bringing on ?
FrankW: Presumably you aren't willing to spend 10-20
man years on the effort without funding.
strk: do you see a problem here ?
strk: how man-years would it be if the DWG specs were
available ?
FrankW: Obviously much less.
strk: so, what's this tax on innovation ?
As Frank put it "open file formats are critical to interoperability
and the open source ecosystem", and collectively we can attempt to
take "pro-competition and pro-interoperability actions"
I see the draft Open Service Definition work at
http://opendefinition.org/osd/ and i would be interested in setting up
something like it for Open Formats. I would also like to find out who
else is feeling the pain on this, with commonsense to contribute.
cheers,
jo
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--
Paolo Cavallini, see: http://www.faunalia.it/pc