Benjamin Geer on Sun, 22 Apr 2001 21:08:26 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001) |
On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 06:14:29PM +0200, Florian Cramer wrote: > Free Software culture and politics can't be separated from its cultural > products which structurally mirror the openness of the development > process, while proprietary software achieves user-friendliness through > standardization, i.e.: closure. It goes without saying that functional > closure, at the expense of freedom, is helpful, necessary and inevitable > in any system. Perhaps I'm simply misunderstanding, but it seems to me that there's no conflict between Free Software and standardisation; in practice, they depend heavily on each other. Later in your message, you mention open standards such as HTML and JPEG; one could also mention PNG images (the non-patented alternative to GIF), MPEG audio, the TeX typesetting language, XML (on which a multitude of open data formats are based), and nearly all the protocols that make the Internet work (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, MIME, FTP, etc.). GNU/Linux and the various BSD operating systems are largely based on the POSIX standard for Unix. Free Software developers are generally loath to create one-off data formats; we tend to use open standards whenever possible. Indeed, the use of an open standard is often crucial to the survival of a Free program, because users want interoperability with their other favourite programs. This is one reason why new data formats and protocols constantly emerge from Free Software culture, and find their way into W3C or ISO standards documents. > It's important to make people more aware that digital art in proprietary > formats is, as a matter of fact, owned and controlled by the company > which created the matching authoring software. In many cases, spreading > codecs and formats is a commercial scheme to lock in those who settle > (and then depend) on them. I see two ways for artists to resist being locked into proprietary formats: 1. Pressure software manufacturers to open up their existing formats, and to relinquish any patents that apply to those formats. 2. Create artists' consortiums to define and implement open formats, with the help of Free Software developers. > ...and another problem is that GNU/Linux and other Free Software > operating systems (like Free/Net/OpenBSD) don't provide standardized > high-level APIs for the kind of applications you develop. (I.e. no > unified screen/printer imaging layers, different incompatible audio APIs > all without built-in codecs, no standard GUI, no standard component > model.) Both Macintosh and Windows are much better suited as target > platforms for your projects. I think there's a contradiction in what you're saying there. Macintosh and Windows have very different GUIs, component models, and high-level APIs. Developing an application that will run on Windows as well as Macintosh is considerably more challenging than developing one that will run on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. On the Free operating systems, the absence of a standard GUI is not as much of a problem as you'd think. The different GUI environments are not mutually exclusive; applications written for one environment can be run in the other environments, as long as the user has the necessary libraries installed. Which isn't a problem, because they're free. -- Benjamin Geer http://www.btinternet.com/~benjamin.geer _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold