[ale] Re: News bulletin: The temperature seems to be cooling down inHell!!!

[Jim Philips]

There was a good follow up to this today in Good Morning Silicon Valley. They 
linked to an article by a guy at Jupiter Research. His main point is spelled 
out nicely here:

"By my definition open means that some published standard, typically one 
governed by an independent group, makes a format easy to adopt and freely and 
ubiquitously distributable. Additionally, the format must maintain the 
integrity of the file as created by the author. JPEG is an excellent example 
of an accepted standard easily and widely supported. Most folks don't need to 
worry about the authoring program with JPEG, whether Adobe Photoshop, Corel 
PaintShop or Microsoft Picture It!. People saving images in JPEG are assured 
that they will look the same regardless of supporting program used to open 
the file. HTML is another example, as is XML. But XML's openness doesn't 
necessarily extend to a format. Raw XML and a XML format are not the same.
Microsoft contends the new formats are open because its proprietary XML 
schemas are published and available for license on a royalty-free basis. By 
my definition of open--and putting aside need for a standards body for a 
moment--that information would have to allow third parties to create products 
that could open Microsoft file formats exactly as how they were saved by the 
author. I haven't seen anything yet to suggest this would certainly be the 
case."

http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/008558.html