Re: [ossig] Open source software that does not follow open standards?

[Yusseri Yusoff <yusseri@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 03 August 2004 09:13, Christopher DeMarco wrote:
>
> Since  you're looking for  projects  which  willfully act insane,  the
> possible MS FAT patents don't really  count towards putting the kernel
> under this  category.  But what about Samba,  or the kernel driver for
> RW NTFS?  Hell, what about WINE?

Samba, rw NTFS and WINE are all software written to enable interoperability 
with the other fella. I don't think that counts. They were just reacting to a 
need. I'm sort of looking for software written simply because the author(s) 
thought they'd have a better way of doing something as opposed to the 
published standard.

I'll come clean here. This has something to do with the fact that some 
"organisations" have been saying that the MAMPU OSS Masterplan constitutes 
discrimination towards proprietary software and went on about open standards, 
hinting that not all OSS are standards compliant. I've often tried to explain 
to anyone who would listen (on the other side) that there's no *impetus* for 
any OSS coder to write non-compliant stuff, but they don't seem to get it. 
So, I'm off looking for the exceptions that prove the rule.

There are cases where a piece of OSS writes its own data format and structure 
for r/w, e.g. Ogg Vorbis but this is more because the .mp3 format is mired in 
patents. And .mp3 is an "open" standard, is it not?

Talking about open standards, I seem to recall that pdf is not an "open" 
standard per se, more a standard in which the specs are published. So that 
makes it a proprietary open standard, no? For certain values of open, 
obviously.

Yusseri


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