on Open Formats

[Jo Walsh]

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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[Rufus Pollock]

Jo Walsh wrote:

> 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,

I think this sounds a great idea. One of the lacunaes in the Open
Knowledge/Data Definition has always been the fact that item 4. Absence
of Technological Restriction refers explicitly to 'open data format' but
leaves this undefined.

We originally had a dedicated project on the 'open formats/standards'
issue entitled the 'Information Accessibility Initiative':

http://okfn.org/iai/

This has been rather dormant of late but the wiki
(http://okfn.org/iai/wiki) still contains a lot of useful information.

I'd also point to Georg Greve's recent post:

<http://www.fsfe.org/fellows/greve/freedom_bits/an_emerging_understanding_of_open_standards>

>> 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

Absolutely, as is written on the IAI home page:

"The IAI's aim is to promote awareness and use of open formats to ensure
that access to information is not needlessly hampered by technological
barriers."

> 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 entirely agree that open formats/standards are an essential necessary
condition for interoperability and the health of the open source
eco-system however there importance is wider than that as they are also
crucial for a healthy and competitive /proprietary/ software/knowledge
ecosystem.

> 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.

I think this is a great idea and would happily be a contributor. Perhaps
it could be set up at:

http://opendefinition.org/ofd/

or (more verbosely) at:

http://opendefinition.org/open_format_definition/

~rufus

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