[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Whitepapers and ScreenShots of Office 11 XML Featur es
On Tuesday 17 December 2002 16:40, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > Is there a set of properties that define "open"? > > Is there a subset of properties of all office systems > that will make that cut? I've been thinking that there are various properties that are 'open'; an open system need not have all of them, and it's a fuzzy logic problem to say how many you need to be 'open'. Properties might include: 1) The data formats / protocols being publicly readable and implementable; not necessarily all of them but enough to interoperate, eg some implementations of open systems (even reference implementations) can of course have private implementation-specific data formats that are used internally 2) Reference source code for a programmer's library providing basic access to the data / protocol being available. 3) A fully fledged usable reference implementation of the system being available; this is a superset of (2). 4) The results of (2) or (3) being free software and usable, as opposed to just 'source you can play with but not use for commercial purposes' or 'a lame or crippled implementation that can at best just be a guide to implementors'. 5) The published data formats / protocols being maintained by a standards body or reasonably unbiased industry consortium, as opposed to being published by the original manufacturer with little or no external input 6) The presence of more than one decent commercial implementation that are actually competing, which tends to imply that if any one of them starts trying to add proprietary extensions they won't be used because users will resist the loss of interoperability ...any others? I've put them in an approximate ordering by strength. -- A city is like a large, complex, rabbit - ARP
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