Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: Patented videoshop opens in Wales

[Chris Croughton]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 07:14:57PM +0100, Marco Schulze wrote:

> Fileformats are like the alphabet: It's necessary to have open standards 
> that everyone can use. Otherwise, we end up in the Celtic age > 2000 
> years ago, when reading and writing were privileges of the priests!

And not unlike the current situation with legal documents.

> The propriatery formats are pushed into the market by powerful 
> monopolists. They establish a "secret language" and exclude everyone 
> they want. That's creating a monopoly on information itself as they can 
> decide who is allowed to read/write!

Not quite: they allow anyone to read and write as long as they pay for
the priest-class scribe.

> Markus Gerwinski has written a very good text about it. Unfortunately, 
> it's in German,

That's the best bit about it!  It illustrates exactly the problem caused
by non-open file formats.  Imagine that German was patented as a
language, and that translating from or to the language was forbidden
unless you paid for a licence to use an 'official' translator.  Or, to
more accurately represent the current situation, do it with English --
we've let everyone use our language freely up to now, but now we want
everyone to pay us for a licence to use it (see the MS licencing of the
FAT filesystem).

> but maybe Babelfish can help you to at least understand 
> a bit:
> 
> http://www.pl-berichte.de/edit/nov2002a.html

Babelfish, to understanding document this, helping is, but clearly
writing understanding in total not is <g>.  I think I understood it
better in German (it is indeed a good article)...

If we had to pay to translate it into English...

Chris C