Week 5

Monday February 8

Topics:

  • Open Standards
  • Open Infrastructure

Readings (4):

While there is no categorical definition of “open standard”, the concept is generally understood to mean public specifications combined with unrestricted use. 5 benefits of open standards are briefly discussed (lower cost, lower risk, interoperability, flexibility, fast development and implementation). When open standards are in use by any group developing similar products or services, there is an open invitation for others to join the existing efforts or to start their own.

FOSS Open Standards (Wikibooks)

The above Wikibooks article outlines Principles of Open Standards as set out by Bruce Perens, whose definition is widely accepted in FOSS communities. One of the open standards that is effecting the way you are reading this very handbook is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standard, one of the many standards maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the International Organization for Standards (ISO). The HTTP standard is the foundation for data communication that happens on the Web, which means that every time you access a webpage or other resource on the Web, the software you're using (your browser and the server it speaks to) is essentially speaking the same language. Both ends know what to expect, and anyone can create their own resources (webpages, etc) that use HTTP without asking permission or paying a fee. This is a powerful open standard that took a great deal of coordination to develop and maintain, but has is still in use more than twenty years after the Web was born.

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), and Extensible Markup Language (XML) are all important Internet open standards, too. Their evolution and purposes are explained. There is universal adoption of these standards, making possible the Internet we know today.

Open Standards from the Free Software Foundation Europe (webpage)

This brief article from Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) emphasizes five key points that define what an open standard is, in terms of a file format or protocol. Consider the five key points in the context of digital files you work with on a regular basis. Do you often send documents created in Microsoft Word to friends or colleagues? If you use a later (more recent) version of MS Office, it's likely that you create files that are in a .docx, .pptx or .xlsx format, which are proprietary (not open) file formats. In practice, this means that to open one of these files, I need to have the later version of MS Office to open the file as it was originally formatted. Yes, I can attempt to open the files in LibreOffice or a similar software, but there's no guarantee that the document will carry all the formatting originally intended. Conversely, if I created a file in LibreOffice and saved it in an OpenDocument format .odf, the file could be opened by anyone with all the content formatting retained as I originally designed it to be (even if the recipient needed to run LibreOffice - free software - to do so). No cost involved, no pain, no loss of content or formatting.

How Apple is Sabotaging an Open Standard for Digital Books (webpage)

Hey! Have you heard about that neat ebook creation tool called iBooks Author? It allows you to make interactive electronic books using the pretty graphical user interface (GUI) styling we've come to know and love from Apple. But guess what? Unless you have the cash to purchase an iPad, you're not going to be able to open an iBook...simply because it uses Apple's proprietary file format ".iba". But isn't there an open file format for ebooks? You betcha: it's called ePub. The article above outlines the steps through which Apple has slowly (or quickly) edged towards locking out the ePub open standard, and now iBooks Author doesn't support ePub at all. This means you can't open an iBook using any other ePub editor, and that's sad.

Tim Berners-Lee on the Web at 25: the past, present and future (webpage)

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (WWW, or Web for short) while working at CERN in the early 1990's. In this article, Berners-Lee reflects on the Web 25 years after it's birth, and makes a series of calls for the Web to return to the way it was originally designed: as a decentralized, open, inclusive platform for creation and collaboration. In recent years the Internet, and the Web specifically have come under attack of those who wish to close off access and disrupt the neutral, democratic nature of this technology. Keep these ideas and issues fresh in your mind as we move through the next several topics of this course.

Assignments:

Blog post #3

Write a 3-5 paragraph blog post that recounts a time when you were unable to transfer media (music, books, movies, etc) from one device to another because of incompatbility issues. For instance, if you purchased an eBook through Apple's online store and then wanted to read the same book on your Amazon Kindle, were you able to? Or if you "bought" a movie on Amazon and then realized you were only able to view the movie on Amazon's specific app. Many of us make concessions every time we purchase media through an online vendor. It's time to bring those stories to light.

If you have never experienced this phenomenon, find a friend or relative who has, and share their story. What advice would you give to someone struggling with media locked into vendor apps or devices? What choices would you make in the future to actually get what you pay for?

Additional Resources

results matching ""

    No results matching ""