[OSGeo-Discuss] Re: Sign the Hague declaration

[Lester Caine]

P Kishor wrote:
>>> "free and open digital standards" is all well and good but a
>>> meaningless concept. Standard for what?
>>>
>>  But disagree there. Switching from M$ documents to 'real' open source
>> documents and dropping licensed graphical data in favour of OSM and other
>> free map data opens the door to 'Standardising' on something that we can all
>> cooperate on.
> 
> It still is not clear what the "something" is... are you advocating a
> standard for a license or a standard for a format? Are you talking
> about standards in office-productivity applications (word-processing,
> spreadsheet, presentation software) or in databases (should we boycott
> everyone who uses Oracle and Ingres?) or remote sensing (does IDL go
> out the window?) or medical imaging or audio or video or ... you get
> the picture. Let me repeat my question.
> 
> Standard for what?

Simply a standard for what we are looking to cooperate on. OSM has a rather 
woolly standard for mapping data, it does not cost a penny to obtain it, and 
it has a considerable amount of free data behind it. It is evolving and 
expanding as needs dictate.
SQL is another area where the 'standard' costs an arm and a leg, but there are 
very good implementations to access it that are freely available. If my 
customer insists on Oracle then so be it, they pay all the additional costs, 
but my open source equivalent - Firebird  - would do the same job for my 
applications - without the additional costs.
There is no need for the billions spent on ISO. We just need to agree on what 
we are doing and publish that information somewhere and cooperate in 
maintaining it?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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