IT, Be Free!

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Group, along with IBM, has published a 500-word document that it hopes developers will endorse. The 'Developer Declaration of Independence' enjoins corporations, governments, organizations, and individuals to adopt and protect open standards in order to promote interoperability among all vendors and give IT customers freedom of choice. The Boston-based Open Group promotes the POSIX open standard and sells compliance testing to OS vendors. It has not yet organized a 'Boston IT Party,' however."

Open Group

[ultrabot]

From TFS (and TFA):
The Boston-based Open Group promotes the POSIX open standard and sells compliance testing to OS vendors.

It should be noted that this appears to be an explanation what Open Group is, rather than what the petition is about. I would feel uncomfortable signing something that helps them "sell compliance testing", but that's emphatically *not* what the petition seems to be about - and the summary gives it that unwanted spin.

That said, this is great stuff. Open standards have always been the state of mind of every developer worth their salt (apart from those with extremely lucrative proprietary interests - IBM of yore, MSFT of today), but it's nice to see some more focused approach to promoting open standards.

And these days, we got IBM backing us. No doubt various naysayers are eager to jump on the fact that openness is "convenient" to IBM, they are not altruistic, blah blah - but that's exactly what makes me feel comfortable: if openness was incovenient and required some kind of altruistic, it could stop by the time of next change of the exec team at IBM.

Re:"open standard" are a waste of time

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Linux are mostly based on Posix. Some things are not defined in Posix and some things are not so good in Posix but mostly Linux follows Posix.

And thats a good thing!

editor-check

[nusratt]

"The 'Developer Declaration of Independence' enjoins corporations, governments, organizations, and individuals to adopt and protect open standards"

in a 'Declaration of Independence', I doubt you meant:

enjoin \en-JOIN\, transitive verb:
1. To direct or impose with authority; to order.
2. To prohibit; to forbid.

perhaps you meant:

exhort
v. exhorted, exhorting, exhorts
v. tr.
To urge by strong, often stirring argument, admonition, advice, or appeal: exhorted the troops to hold the line.