07.11.2003

Peter is touring again - Confirmed!
According to a recent interview with Peter, he'll be coming back and also touring in Germany again. Great! Where can I get the tickets? Unfortunately it's not a totally new tour, but "only" an improved Growing Up one, but as this one was superb anyway,  I will definitly watch it again. 11:22:11 AM

Standard vs. Open Source?

Reflecting the W-JAX in Munich one topic is still going through my mind. It's the standards versus open source discussion. Dramatising the opinion of some vendors, you shouldn't use open source because in most cases the open source projects do not follow an (industrial) standard. Hmm. And this is not the opinion of only one or two persons, it seems to be very widespread. So, what does this mean? Following their opinion, you shouldn't for example use Hibernate or OJB for persistence - you should rather use a JDO compliant product. (Ok, both will sooner or later support JDO, but that doesn't count obviously). And don't use a non standard web framework like Struts, use a JSF compliant one! And you can't use such rebellious frameworks like Cocoon- no way! Ok, just to clarify - this is absolutely not my opinion - it's simply crap. I'm still wondering why people try to push such opinions and try to influence people's minds. Is it simply because some vendors are afraid of loosing market share? It seems to be much easier to sell tools (and maybe training/consulting) for standards than for open source projects. Is it this? Or do they believe that they can overcome open source by promoting standards? I honestly don't know! But this leads to the question, what is a standard (in computer science)? It's more or less a set of papers that define a specific problem domain, how it works, its interface - something like this. Usually, a standard is driven by several "entities" (being it companies or individuals) and is a result of a common understanding and agreement between these entities. An extension of this are "open standards", which means a standard where everyone is invited to participate, comment and improve the standard (for further versions). I know, this is not the formal description of the meaning of "standard", but it already took me a long time to write this paragraph so I hope it's understandable what I mean - even if there are some shortcomings in the description :) So, for users of any technology, an open standard seams like a good solution - there is no vendor lock in and there is the chance of participating and being heard. Doesn't this sound like a healthy community of an open source project? Just a thought anyway. 8:17:41 AM