Adopting Open Standards

This is something I have been crying hoarse for many many years.Now the Britishers (among many others!!) seems to have heard my voice ;-) Do read the full article from the BBC site article.  Read on here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20178175


Wish there were similar initiatives - if not in the Government, at least in our organisations. It confounds me why we can't put this in our RFCs and Procurement processes ?? Again - needs the right people at the right places who understand technology and its implications!!

Extract from the site :

Government IT projects: UK adopts open technology standards

"For too long, government IT has been too expensive, over-specified and run in contract structures that encourage complexity, duplication and fragmented user services," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude in a speech announcing the strategy.

The standards the government wanted to adopt would favour smaller, innovative tech firms and would demand compliance with open data formats and protocols from every IT supplier, he said.

In the technology world, open standards stand in opposition to proprietary formats. As their name implies they let everyone that wants to look at how a program is built or data is formatted.
This openness helps to flush out bugs in software and makes it easier for data to travel and be re-used as programmers can easily see how it is structured.

Some more info on Open Standards

Open Standards on Wikipedia found here

A quick primer on the Open Standards principles from here :-

Availability
Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.

Maximize End-User Choice
Open Standards create a fair, competitive market for implementations of the standard. They do not lock the customer in to a particular vendor or group.

No Royalty
Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee. Certification of compliance by the standards organization may involve a fee.

No Discrimination
Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendor's implementation. Certification organizations must provide a path for low and zero-cost implementations to be validated, but may also provide enhanced certification services.

Extension or Subset
Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form. However, certification organizations may decline to certify subset implementations, and may place requirements upon extensions (see Predatory Practices).

Predatory Practices
Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics. The licenses attached to the standard may require the publication of reference information for extensions, and a license for all others to create, distribute, and sell software that is compatible with the extensions. An Open Standard may not othewise prohibit extensions

Open Document Format Support by Microsoft

Hi All - those hesitating to move to OpenOffice/LibreOffice - here is some heartening news!! Microsoft seems to have had a change of heart and is supporting the 'Open Document Format" ODF which is the heart of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Thats is documents made in OpenOffice/LibreOffice or any other Open Source Office Suite will seamlessly work on MS Office. Microsoft is infact sponsoring the next ODF-Fest in Apr 2012!! Check out this site http://www.odfplugfest.org/2012-brussels/

"Join us in Brussels The ODF plugfests are an ongoing series of vendor-neutral events, bringing together implementers and stakeholders of the standard. The goal is to achieve maximum interoperability by running scenario-based tests in a hands-on manner and discuss new and proposed features of the ODF specification.
The eighth ODF plugfest will take place in Brussel (Belgium) on April 26th/27th 2012 hosted by Microsoft Office and organised by OpenDoc Society. So mark your calendar!"

So guys - instead of using pirated MS-Office suites in your home/office PC - go ahead and buy the MS-Office suite or download your free office suite from http://www.libreoffice.org/download - which runs equally well on your Windows Machines as well as Linux.

OpenGL vs DirectX

A very apt article/blog and must read for all those working on graphics (Simulators? Domain awareness? Game Development?)

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

OpenGL Graphics Libraries are Open Standards, first developed by 'Silicon Graphics' and currently supported on all platforms has for long has been living in the shadows of Microsoft's DirectX. Time to get to know the truth other than DirectX marketing over dose!!

One of the comments in the article drives home the point, which I am reproducing just to hightlight lest you may miss it.

To an observation that DirectX is easier for development view ease of use with Microsoft's Development tools and integration, Frozencow replies:

Yes, I first also thought that was really cool.I started with C#+ ManagedDirectX (MDX). MDX is a sort of wrapper for DirectX that exposes the functionality to .NET. But after using it some time, it felt like it was always coming second. A small subset of features were available in MDX and newer features took Microsoft WAY too long to be implemented into MDX.

NA does more 'abstraction' over the graphics API. It makes it much easier to start with your game and it a very clean and polished library (compared to MDX). But, like MDX, it made a small subset of the features of DirectX available to the programmer. Next to that, it requires people to install another framework next to your game. My little application/game was smaller in size than the framework itself! Especially that last part is in my opinion not cool.

I can see why. DirectX is quite complex. This makes it hard for people (Microsoft) to create a wrapper for it. That's where OpenGL has an advantage. It's much more simple than DirectX. Wrappers like Tao Framework and OpenTK expose most functions of OpenGL to .NET. Also, IF functions are missing, you can easily extend the wrapper with the needed functions, since the wrappers are opensource and OpenGL has a simple structure.

Next to that, your .NET game/application will work on more platforms, since you can run it on Linux through Mono. This is why I'm nowadays using OpenGL instead of DirectX. It's just a bit more freedom (nice catchphrase eh?) for me.