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Degrees of Openness (O'ReillyNet)
Adrien Lamothe
explores some aspects of openness in an O'Reilly article.
"The open source software movement has received a lot of press coverage in recent years. A result of this is many people associating the term "open" with open source software. This popular definition of "openness" is incomplete. Openness affects many aspects of computing besides freedom to view and modify source code. Shrewd proprietary computer companies have been able to take advantage of popular misconceptions about openness, masking their products in partial degrees of openness, then applying the "open" label. We should understand the different forms of openness and how they apply to the many facets of computers, software, systems, and even warranties and service agreements."
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The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 11, 2006 19:12 UTC (Sat) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link] There is at least one snare the author has fallen for himself. The article calims that "Microsoft's .doc format has been standard for 20 years". Unfortunately .doc is not a single format and I suspect what it was 20 years ago is no longer understood by any current versions of M$ Word. MS Word 8/97 uses a different format from MS word 7/95.
Prior to the widespread availability of {Star,Open}Office just .doc was just about impossible to read using anything except M$ word.
The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 12, 2006 7:30 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I suspect what it was 20 years ago is no longer understood by any current versions of M$ Word No need to suspect - it's a fact. Right now you can download old .doc file from Microsoft server - and this .doc file will not be readable by MS Office 2003. Prior to the widespread availability of {Star,Open}Office just .doc was just about impossible to read using anything except M$ word. Not really true: WordPerfact, Lotus SmartSuite and others had the converters. Of course "the latest and greatest" .doc was rarely supported by anything except the "latest and greatest" version of MS Office. Sometimes even MS Works ("reduced version" of MS Office from Microsoft) was unable to read "latest and greatest" incarnation. The same is true with new .docx format. Microsoft offers converters - but only for MS Office. There are no free stand-alone convertor (there are such a convertor for .ODF if you'll consider OOo is free).
The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 12, 2006 7:37 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The article calims that "Microsoft's .doc format has been standard for 20 years" It does no such thing. It claims "Microsoft's .doc document storage format has been ubiquitous for about 20 years" - and while it's not quite true (20 years ago it was quite hard to find MS Word, the most popular wordporcessor was WordPerfect) it's certainly true enough. I presume author knows about format changes between versions - anyone who used MS Word long enough was biten at least once...
The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 12, 2006 20:41 UTC (Sun) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link] > It claims "Microsoft's .doc document storage format has been ubiquitous for about 20 years" [...] it's certainly true enough.
No. The phrase ".doc document storage format has been" is singular, implying that there is and has been only one such format. The truthful would be the plural, ".doc document storage formats have been".
> format changes between versions - anyone who used MS Word long enough was biten at least once...
Giving the lie to the implicit singular of ".doc [...] format".
The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 12, 2006 21:11 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's hair-splitting. I've seen phrases like "C language has been in widespread usage for the last 30 years" - and nobody objected to them. Even if you can not compile early C programs by modern compiler: changes between pre-ANSI C, ANSI C78 and ANSI C99 are deep enough to claim that it's three (or even more) different languages. C evolved over time. The same happened with ".doc format". Now it's true that for programming laguage it's less problematic then for wordprocessor format: 30 years old C program today will have mostly historical value (and it's readable by humans!), but 20 years old .doc file can be of more the just historic value (and it's not readable by humans!), but still the idea is the same.
The .doc format does not exist Posted Nov 13, 2006 0:48 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] I think the situations are reasonbly different enough to draw attention to the issue.
C is a continuum of publically documented changes. There's a lot of code that builds on the entire history of C compilers, even if it isn't the usual case.
DOC is a long list of formats which have little in common overall, and have large number of arbitrary undocumented changes. Things added to, changed, and removed in the various DOC formats were made with little mind to compatability, and as such the internals of modern versions have essentially nothing to do with earlier revisions.
I agree you don't necessary have to read it into the the document, but I think it's implied.
MySQL licensing Posted Nov 13, 2006 20:58 UTC (Mon) by szoth (subscriber, #14825) [Link] From the article:
"MySQL licensing allows free use of the product for noncommercial purposes, with payment required by those who use it commercially. While the company is doing okay, many people appear to use the database for commercial purposes without paying."
Either the wording here is unfortunate, or the author doesn't understand MySQL AB's license offerings.
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/
Is he saying that people are aquiring mysql under their "Commercial" license and then violating its terms? Is he saying that he thinks the free license has a non commercial use requirement--does he not know it's GPL?
MySQL licensing Posted Nov 14, 2006 13:10 UTC (Tue) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] I know a story of a friend of mine that started developping a commercial aplication using MySQL and tried to get an answer from them about the pricing and never got a response (if he used the wrong channels, don't know).
In the meantime he discovered PostgresSQL and the final version used it instead, but for some time he decided that if they didn't answer was because they didn't care (he was doing it solo, and his application is not a "popular" application).
MySQL licensing Posted Nov 14, 2006 22:57 UTC (Tue) by chromatic (subscriber, #26207) [Link] The wording was unfortunate; I should have caught the potential for confusion during editing. I've updated the article for clarity.
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