Re: What is the "open web" ?

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 2, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Andreas Kuckartz <A.Kuckartz@ping.de> wrote:

> Mark Watson:
>> Sure. I meant that some people would like the W3C policy to refer to
>> Free Open Source rather than just Open Source.
>
> The term "Free and Open Source Software" (FOSS) could or should be used
> instead of Open Source. But that would not result in any practical
> difference because all Free / Copyleft licenses are also Open Source
> licenses.

The converse is not true, though (IIUC).

>
> More precise would be referring to the Open Source Definition
> (http://opensource.org/docs/osd) and the list of OSI-approved licenses
> (http://opensource.org/licenses).

I understood that not all those licenses would qualify as 'FOSS'. Am I
using the term FOSS incorrectly ?

>
>>> Neither Geolocation nor WebGL "basically" require closed
>>> source drivers.
>>
>> I believe they require proprietary hardware/firmware to be performant,
>> though I could be wrong there. Or this could be true now but will
>> change in future (certainly it will change when the various patents
>> involved expire).
>
> Well, some manufacturers of 3D graphics hardware certainly make it very
> difficult for Open Source developers, which resulted in this well known
> reaction by Linus Torvalds last year:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
>
> But those difficulties are not inherent in 3D.
>
> (One main problem here in my opinion is that there are Linux
> distributions which promote and encourage the installation of closed
> source drivers for certain graphics hardware and by doing so encourage
> the hardware manufacturers to continue their bad practices.)
>
> ***
>
> Maybe someone reading this mail is interested in this:
>
> 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
> Published on April 29, 2013
> Written by Michael Larabel
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_nvidia_15way&num=1
>
> AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support
> Published on April 02, 2013
> Written by Fatima Sheremetyeva
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_opensource_uvd&num=1

Nevertheless, the hardware itself and the firmware running I it are
proprietary. I am trying to understand where people draw the line I
terms of functionality that is ok to expose on the open web. It seems
in the case of graphics hardware, if the hardware is widely available
off-the-shelf and can be made using open source drivers to work on
multiple platforms and support a standard API (in this case OpenGL),
then this is ok. But maybe I'm wrong there ?

...Mark
>
> Cheers,
> Andreas

Received on Sunday, 2 June 2013 23:29:54 UTC