[Discuss] Good quote on open standards

[Alan W. Irwin]

"Microsoft Office is still a major hurdle; we need more governments and
companies to have the bravery to standardise on truly open formats. A
proprietary undocumented text format as the de facto standard -- and that's
what .doc is -- is a shame for all parties involved. It's like using a
special patented ink that can only be read with special patented sun
glasses. Who would want to use that for all their scientific, private and
business documents? Probably nobody. Why they do so with computers is beyond
me."

>From the Matthias Ettrich (founder of KDE) interview at
http://www.efytimes.com/efytimes/25412/news.htm.  All that interview is worth
reading, but I especially enjoyed the above quote.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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