Re: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001)

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@btinternet.com>]

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

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