On Thu, Aug 30, 2007, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote about "Re: Open standards": > However, you are looking it it through Israeli eyes. Microsoft Word is > a worldwide product and there are millions of users. When Qtext or > Einstein where at their peak, computers where so heavily taxed that only > the rich, or companies could afford them.
Ok, then, forget Israeli products. What about Lotus Word Pro, then? This used to be a popular format, and where I work (IBM) used to be *the most* popular format, more than Microsoft Word, as recently as 10 years ago. Then, over a period of a few years, people suddenly started switching to Microsoft Word, to the point that nowadays Lotus Word Pro is no longer available in IBM - anywhere (even though IBM owns Lotus!). Once in a while I hear people who tell me they are stuck with some old "lwp" or "prz" files, and don't know how to read them. > Speaking of open standards, in 1970 until the 1990's IBM was the world's > largest publishing house and ALL of their documents were written in > Script. How many of you have Script interpeters, could at any time code > in it, or have even heard of it? So you agree it's not an Israel-specific thing, then. > BTW, except for a handfull of ex-pat Israelis and a shaliach or two, > in 1991, no one had heard of Q-Text outside of Israel. Obviously. This was just an example - maybe I shouldn't have used an Israeli example... > > Ironically, the situation of MS-Word in this respect then Qtext is better > > because of free software! > > How is Q-Text free? There is a difference between abandonware and free. No, that's not what I meant! I meant that when Qtext died, it died completely - nobody is able to read their old qtext files, and they're screwed. If MS-Word dies, however, people are not screwed, because they still have OpenOffice, Koffice, Antiword, and a lot of other programs who can read MS-Word documents. Because of that, ironically, what makes MS-Word a relatively "safe" format for long-term-document-preservation is not the strong backing of the Microsoft company, but rather the small free-software projects that reverse-engineered the format it and created unofficial readers for it. > I also see FOSS programs evolving, for example, I have Open Office documents > that can not be read by Open Office. For example, Open Office has been > abandoned > on several older platforms and version 1 won't read properly ODT2 version > documents. Right now Open Office version 2 can read Open Office version 1 > documents but what about Open Office version 7, or 10? or if there is one > a year, 30? But wait a minute - because OpenOffice is free software, you are not limited to buying the latest version that is sold in the store. If you wish, you can get OpenOffice version 1 now, and run that. If there was enough interest in the public, you'd even have binary distributions including OpenOffice version 1. With proprietary software, you can't do that: once Microsoft decided to dump Word 8 and move to Word 9, there's no way you can get Word 8 any more. In 10 years, Word 8 will no longer run on any modern computer, and nobody can do anything about it. Similarly, it is conceivable (although probably not true) that if I take a paper I wrote 14 years ago in troff (see the typeset results in http://nadav.harel.org.il/papers/eigen.ps.gz) and try to run today's groff on it, I'll run into a few problems. If I do, and if I can't get the new version to work, then all I have to do is to get a 10 year old version of groff, compile it, and use it. I won't be trivial, but it will be legal, and very possible. > Sure someone could take the well published format for version 1 documents and > write a program to convert them to version 30, but what if you are the only > person with a document, and you can't program. If this is important enough to you, you can pay a programmer to do it for you! Moreover, with Free Software, you don't need to write a program to convert version 1 to version 30 - you can attempt the (usually) easier task of compiling the old version 1 program on the current system. > For example, Open Office only exists because SUN hoped to compete with > Microsoft Office and need to fill a hole in the software offerings for > their hardware. Eventually they realized usurping Windows and M/S > Office was not going to happen, so they open sourced their program. I don't agree. It is possible that had OpenOffice not existed, then KOffice, Abiword, or something else would have become the most popular office application for Linux, and perhaps the extra attention would have made them even better than they are today. Besides, Free Software release by a commercial company is still Free Software, and we shouldn't stigmatize it for being "less free", when it is actually just as free as any free software. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Aug 30 2007, 16 Elul 5767 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"How could we possibly use sex to get http://nadav.harel.org.il |what we want? Sex IS what we want!" Fraser ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
