John Walker has been so kind as to write a demoroniser perl script for cleaning up documents produced by Microsoft applications. I have, too, abandoned use of any Microsoft applications (some time ago), and I go so far as to (politely) ask those who send me things such as MS Word .doc formatted documents to please resend in an open, non-proprietary format. It’s just rude to send documents to the public at large with the expectation that they will buy whatever monstrously bloated, virus ridden software the sender has deigned to choose, is it not? So, please, please: do not send Microsoft formatted documents.

The excerpt below is from the demoroniser script’s introduction, and explains better than I could why this, unfortunately, is necessary:

Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.

This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I’d developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint’s “Save as HTML” feature (I have abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same grammatical errors I’d noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.

A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own “extension” to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0×82 through 0×95–this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.

These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things you’ve been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn’t stop there–in their inimitable fashion (who would want to?)–they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms (or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser’s font one of the many TrueType fonts which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).

You see, “state of the art” Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called “smart quotes.” (Rule of thumb–every time Microsoft use the word “smart,” be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these products contain.

A couple of points (not in the order of your arguments) [with edits to my original reply]:

1. *Desktop* linux is brand new — it, and the dozens of application software projects necessary to make a desktop linux go has only begun to come together over the past two or three years. To wit: Ubuntu, now the most popular distro, is only four years old. Keep in mind this principle: once you written the third or fourth version of something like .pdf/web viewers, or word processors, little further innovation is needed. How much different is MS Word 95 from 98, 2000, XP, or 2007/8, or Abiword and OpenOffice for that matter? Not much. MS got the word processor gui right when it still was on the Mac, where it ironically began. So, there will be an open source equivalent for every type of software, and many are just now getting to an 85% to 95% equivalency to their proprietary cousins.

2. If you have any doubt as to the profound power of a monopolist to retain control of markets without juridical oversight, or of the mechanics thereof, it might be time to take a cursory review of Microsoft’s misdeeds, or of Standard Oil’s.

The latest catastrophe about to be visited on world wide consumers by the prostrate and corrupt US legal system? Vista’s draconian DRM.

Here’s an excellent run-down of what will probably result in the break-up of Microsoft, or the US loss of software hegemony: A Cost Analysis of Vista Content Protection, by Peter Gutmann.

3. Everything you say regarding Linux based Desktop environments’ need to pay attention to gui usability, and to test, is spot on. Gnome still feels clumsy, and KDE does fine, once cleaned up by somebody like the Ubuntu project. Gnome and KDE are vastly improved from even a year or two ago, as are many of the other window managers out there.

4. Diversity in Linux distributions is a strength, not a weakness. You badly underestimate the scale of development unleashed by open sourced software. In addition, what you’ve said is akin to arguing that the West has been hurt by the free exchange of knowledge that characterizes its universities; that a closed, peer-reviewless, proprietary system of academic inquiry would serve humankind the best. This is demonstrably false.

The US constitution of 1787 sought to balance the need to reward innovation with the need for open academic inquiry. From the the broken US patent system to the DMCA, to the moribund state of US Anti-trust enforcement, this system is now in dire need of reform.

The plethora of linux distributions, ranging from 50 MB fully functional gui’d desktop environments to multi-gig distros such as Ubuntu, openSuse, et al., to embedded systems vetted for stability — the Linux ecosystem’s diversity is a testament to the virtues of free inquiry, the absurdity of patenting software, and the novel scale of intellectual work made possible by the internet.

5. The command-line: this is just silly. The command line exists on Windows boxes. One can hack the registry or talk to the OS via the Windows API, or, conversely, one can never see a jot of code on a Windows box, same as on Linux boxes. If Linux desktop environment and application users too often are subjected to command-line fixes, that just supports your argument that desktop oriented Linux environments still need work. That work is progressing at an astonishing speed, thanks again to the scale of development made possible by the internet and open access to code.

What I have found, however, is that the Windows command-line environment is gravely impoverished compared to Unix/Linux. Yes, I have done extensive work on both platforms. The Microsoft command line environment has come a long way, but it still lacks the depth and richness that the Unix/Linux environment possesses.

The article that this post is a reply too: Five crucial things … .

I also posted the trackback above as a reply in the blog.

I attempted to reply to this column by Doc Searls, Linux for Suits - The World Live Web, but the reply appears to have disappeared into the net ether, so I’ll try to restate it here. Searls outlines his conception of a “live web” in the article’s concluding paragraphs. To me, this idea sounds very much like Wiliam Gibson’s vision of a “consensual hallucination” (which is not necessarily a pejorative term — any human constructed social framework could be called a ‘hallucination’ of sorts), for which he coined the term “cyberspace.” I also wish(ed) to point to the concrete need for a juridical construction of a civil society in cyberspace, which I think parallels Searls’ calls for what he terms “identity,” as well as the “right” to “network neutral” access to the internet. I tend to frame these issues, following after Gibson’s realization that the franchise of civil society will move largely into cyberspace, in juridical and civil terms first, and technological terms only incidentally.

First, Searls’ concept of a live web, then my discussion of Gibson’s idea.

Searls:

Is it possible that “live” will join “free” and “open” in our pantheon of adjectives? Possibly. Whether or not it does, I’d like to thank my son Allen for being the first to utter “World Live Web”, providing me with a perspective I never knew I lacked, until I heard it.

His original vision of the World Live Web was a literal one: a Web where anybody could contact anybody else and ask or answer a question in real time. When he first encountered the Web, as a researcher, he saw it as something fundamentally deficient at supporting the most human forms of interaction: the kind where one person increased the knowledge of another directly.

We’ve moved a long way in the live direction since Allen first introduced me to the concept. VoIP alone is a huge live category. Mobile Web progress will all happen along its live branch.

Where it goes exactly is anybody’s guess. All we can say for sure is it’s headed toward the sky.

My discussion (that I attempted to post in reply to Searls’ column):

The “World Live Web” sounds like the conception that William Gibson had of the then germinal internet. He foresaw that it would become a space into which the entire politico/socio franchise of society would move. In Neuromancer, Gibson coined a term for this new “place:” cyberspace.

And quite unlike the many Pollyanna-esque visions of the web that have followed, Gibson’s was dystopian. In the tradition of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the net can serve as the a tool of “universal surveillance,” to use Michel Foucault’s description of the “dark side of the enlightenment.” It needn’t necessarily be so, but that is up to us, the hopefully vigilant citzenry.

To wit, patents must not be overly broad, and must not apply to ideas (as Thomas Jefferson argued), copyright must guarantee the right of individuals to benefit from their ingenuity within reason (and for a reasonable length of time, not a corporate lifetime, but rather a human person’s lifetime). Citizens must have a right to access civil spaces to express political opinion — whethor those spaces be cyber’d, shopping mall’d, or public square’d. Yes, that means that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or whomever, cannot block port 25 or forbid the use of servers. Access to the internet will be instrumental to civil liberty in the future, as were postal service and free libraries in the past

Grimthing.com has one of the best write-ups I’ve seen on the relative merits of Photoshop vs. Gimp. Photoshop still beats Gimp for print-oriented production work, but Gimp already has 95% of Photoshop’s features, outstrips Photoshop in some areas, and is quickly gaining even those print capabilities that it once lacked, such as PANTONE and CMYK color tools.

Marc Cantor has written a good summary of current open standards projects (maybe calling them ‘movements’ might be a little more accurate) in an article titled Breaking the Web Wide Open!

His description echoes my experience, which has been that although “incumbents” (Cantor’s term) may be using new technology, they often mimic what they know. Cantor says:

For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs.

And:

While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on proprietary software and algorithms.

Cantor gives an excellent and concise summary of open web services technologies, and lists areas being developed:

Today’s Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemas—the structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a specified server.

The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:

Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control

Cantor then discusses each of these in depth. Quite interesting.

I just wanted to amplify the thread of the last two posts, in which I join in support of the view that open source software is both economically viable and essential to liberty and capitalism. What inspired this particular post was reading the Prudential interview with Eric S. Raymond, in which he says, when asked about the viability of open source as a platform for capitalist enterprise:

Eric Raymond: I would say the best investment possibilities are companies who can use open-source technology to boost the value of our product bundle without being pure play software producers themselves. The prospect of capturing high returns from pure-play software companies I think is increasingly a mirage. I don’t think you’re going to see that happen anymore. And the reason again is fundamental.

What is it — let’s look back at basic economics and think about what is it that enables us to capture high returns from founding and floating a company? Well, basically it’s capital investment. You need to look for business opportunities where it’s possible to scale up returns by pumping in lots of capital and then collecting those scaled up returns. That’s not going to happen much anymore in software because we’ve passed out of a regime where you can scale up returns by pumping in capital.

The reason we used to be in that regime was because computers were expensive. So by pumping in capital, you could afford to equip the business with capital goods that would greatly raise productivity. Also, software distribution was expensive. You had to move physical media around, and that’s also something [else] that you could enable by pumping in a lot of capital.

Well, both of those bottlenecks are gone now. Computers are really cheap, and distribution over the Internet is nearly free, and that means there isn’t really an opportunity to multiply returns by pumping in capital, and the ultimate consequence of that is you shouldn’t bet the farm on a pure play software company. There are still ways for companies like that to make money but not at a volume that is going to sustain a lot of stock market investment.

So I’d say look for companies that are not pure play software but for which software is a critical enabler, something that greatly raises the value of their products, and look for the companies that are most successfully harnessing the energy of the open-source community and working with it to raise product value.

After reading that, I then found this Slashdot discussion when searching for information about use of GIMP in the fx part of the film industry:

Posted by michael on Wed Nov 13, ‘02 12:22 PM
from the thirty-percent-more-gimpy dept.

gosand writes “DesktopLinux.com is running this story about Film Gimp. It is a movie editor based on The Gimp that movie studios have been developing for their own use for a while now. The article is an interview with Robin Rowe about Film Gimp’s use, and includes some interesting info about the film industry’s use of GNU/Linux desktops. One quote worth noting: ‘Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That’s amazing! While the MPAA is campaigning for new restrictions on content, the artists at the studios are using and helping create open source. Having Linux and open source as a crucial part of studio operations may help executives rethink their corporate position on open source and Linux issues.’”

This excerpt reinforces some of Raymond’s observations, in the interview cited above, and elsewhere: that most code (95%) is written in-house; that it is, in fact private industry that writes most open-source code, because they collectively stand to gain enormously from it; that open-source is a superior model of software development; and that although one cannot profit directly (at least as much as used to be possible, pre-internet) from software, one can profit handsomely from services built around open-source.

I neglected in the entry below to link to Eric Raymond’s The Magic Cauldron.