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> ...making such documentation available should be the core demand... not that they necessarily open source their own software... That would work only if compa

> ...making such documentation available should be the core demand... not that they necessarily open source their own software... That would work only if companies could be compelled to release complete documentation. E.g., Microsoft even corrupted[1][2] the ISO standardization process to force through standardization of their OOXML (to take the wind out of worldwide efforts around standardization on the existing ISO standard, ODF) even though the OOXML Microsoft shipped _after_ standardization could not be implemented from the specification in the standard [2]. Forcing companies to provide source for a fully functional driver under a suitable license would prevent this sort of abuse from bad actors. [1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070312083134403 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070312083134403 [2] https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/154.html https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/154.html

tgflynn 4y ago
I think it's fair to expect hardware companies to publish sufficient documentation so that independent software developers can write code to make use of their HW. Preferably that would be done through market pressure, but may at times need government action along antitrust lines. However if the nature of a device is such that a driver for it requires the implementation of non-trivial algorithms then I wouldn't support government action to force companies to open source such code. I think standardization processes are a rather different topic than hardware, but I'm wondering, did the Microsoft shenanigans you mentioned actually prevent people from developing compatible software ? My impression is that the compatibility issues that people had with MS file formats in the 90's have largely been resolved in practice. Is that not the case ?
- sillystuff 4y ago
  Yes, standardization processes are different than hardware, but I expected that the requirements for a full and accurate specification would be stronger for an international standard than random hardware documentation-- and, the MS example showed that even a standards document could be gamed to such an extent as to be unusable to create independent implementations. I don't follow the MS world, but I do recall complaints that OOXML as built by MS included binary blobs (straight out of their old, undocumented, doc and xls formats) wrapped in XML. And, folks using MS software at old job sometimes complained that when I edited an MS document in libre office, "I broke it." Thankfully my group standardized on plain text to make version control more useful, so it only came up when dealing with folks outside the group.

tgflynn 4y ago

I think it's fair to expect hardware companies to publish sufficient documentation so that independent software developers can write code to make use of their HW. Preferably that would be done through market pressure, but may at times need government action along antitrust lines. However if the nature of a device is such that a driver for it requires the implementation of non-trivial algorithms then I wouldn't support government action to force companies to open source such code. I think standardization processes are a rather different topic than hardware, but I'm wondering, did the Microsoft shenanigans you mentioned actually prevent people from developing compatible software ? My impression is that the compatibility issues that people had with MS file formats in the 90's have largely been resolved in practice. Is that not the case ?

sillystuff 4y ago
Yes, standardization processes are different than hardware, but I expected that the requirements for a full and accurate specification would be stronger for an international standard than random hardware documentation-- and, the MS example showed that even a standards document could be gamed to such an extent as to be unusable to create independent implementations. I don't follow the MS world, but I do recall complaints that OOXML as built by MS included binary blobs (straight out of their old, undocumented, doc and xls formats) wrapped in XML. And, folks using MS software at old job sometimes complained that when I edited an MS document in libre office, "I broke it." Thankfully my group standardized on plain text to make version control more useful, so it only came up when dealing with folks outside the group.