Comment by bluecalm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluecalm | Hacker News Reader

I am for one ok with propriety software. A lot of people want to make money by writing closed binaries and a lot of people want to buy them. Arguable a lot of cool things came out of this model. In ideal world you could write your software, make it open source so advanced users could hack/verify security of it and still don't lose any (or many) customers, unfortunately it doesn't work that way in our world.

What I am not ok with though are monopolies, lock-ins and influencing education. There is no excuse to teach/use/promote any of the propriety software in schools. There is no reason to use any of that in government institutions. If one vendor has so prevalent position that there is no (or almost none) alternative then it's a monopoly and it's time to deal with it using antitrust laws (which by the way aren't nearly strong enough these days). If there is no free alternative developing it is great project for government to sponsor.

If people not force-feed Excel, Word, Photoshop, Matlab etc. during their education days still want to use that for convenience later in their career - let them. Just give them real choice by educating them with open tools.

"I am for one ok with propriety software... What I am not ok with though are monopolies, lock-ins and influencing education."

I think one important point is that closed-source proprietary software inherently implies lock-in. Some portion of proprietary file formats are crappy bags of bytes because the company wants a lock-in and some portion are that way because of simple laziness and you can't easily sort which.

The other thing about people using matlab is that society at large, the scientific community and such-and-such large groups pay the price of crap being caught within matlab and whoever writes the original code can just move on.

Actually no. Microsoft at least (this thread mainly targets them) doesn't lock you into any file formats. Why?

a) I've always been able to export/extract data at will.

b) All their protocols and formats are specified openly here: http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/default.as...

a) You only have been able to do it in the way they want you to: by clicking the File menu and saving as a different type.

b) Just because there's an "open" specification, it does not mean their implementation follows it, which is exactly the case for OOXML formats: there are a number of features which Microsoft Office treats differently from what the standard suggests/says, making interoperability/getting things to show up in Office hard as hell.

This is coming from someone who has to use the OOXML SDK daily.

> There is no excuse to teach/use/promote any of the propriety software in schools.

Of course there is, especially for vocational schools. If you're targeting a career, you want to learn the software that is most often used in that job capacity, so you can put that on your resume and improve your chances for landing a job.

It's somewhat different for primary and secondary schools. Generally these schools do not teach individual programs. Instead they teach concepts, and use the program as learning aids. From that perspective, the most important thing the software can do is to just work, and then get out of the way. It's more important that students learn mathematics, than it is for the educational programs to be open source.

> If people not force-feed Excel, Word, Photoshop, Matlab etc. during their education days still want to use that for convenience later in their career - let them. Just give them real choice by educating them with open tools.

The vast majority of Excel, Word, and Photoshop users cannot directly benefit from open-ness, because they are not programmers. Matlab may be an exception.

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