The Linux Extremist

The industry in which I work is not the most technically minded. In fact, many people in my business regard the internet as strange and frightening. For the worst cases, finding the “On” button on the PC is a real achievement. This relative lack of computer savvy has led to some acute symptoms of technical backwardness; a leading example has to do with open standards for information transfers. In short, there are none. It’s not for lack of trying, my firm attempted to lead the way, however the initiative was de-railed by one company who held fast to the belief that if they control a proprietary standard, that they would make it easier to lock in clients. They think by owning the standard, they own the customer.

When I first heard about this, I experienced that rare and transcendent state one has when a conniption occurs. No one has yet been brave enough to tell me if I actually had steam coming out of my ears; apparently I did turn bright red, however. The source of my outrage is simple; I know that open standards are not only a good idea, but they are going to be critical to business in the future.

Firms who adhere to proprietary standards are parasites. They don’t compete on quality of service, rather, they are banking on inconvenience in translating between various formats. Contrary to what one might believe, it’s anti-capitalist; a truly free market calls for a level playing field. For that to exist, open standards should be ubiquitous.

Microsoft, as ever, is leading the struggle against progress. Their reluctance to comply with the Open Document Format is very well known. Similarly, Microsoft has always made it a much simpler matter to integrate like with like rather than allow technologists to mix and match; i.e., it’s far simpler to build an ASP.NET solution for MS SQL than it is to use PHP or Java. In a previous firm of mine, there was an attempt to integrate Perl with .Net technologies; after a great deal of time and money spent on the solution, it was abandoned due to performance issues. In my present firm, communications between PHP and ASP on our present e-commerce solution are so fragile that a schedule to move to make it completely Open Source was recently accelerated.

On the other hand, I can report examples of PHP working with Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL. I can report similarly good results with Java. These solutions have run off of Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD. There are some combinations more appropriate for some solutions, for example, for a high traffic e-commerce solution, I’d recommend a Java / Oracle combination, and for mid-size traffic site, I’d recommend PHP / MySQL; however, these technologies can interoperate without much difficulty.

Fortunately, more and more firms are waking up to the necessity of interoperable standards, not just for internal purposes, but also for common communications to the rest of the world. A good example is the travel industry, one of my previous stomping grounds. Opentravel.org has been publishing common XML schemas since 2001. This should be very surprising; speaking from personal experience, I can say a lot of travel firms absolutely despise each other. However, even they managed to see the benefits; travel providers win because they only have to expose their information in one format. Agencies win because their development costs are reduced because of having this easily accessible method. Furthermore, adopting these guidelines has made it easier for “agglomerators” to arise such as travelsupermarket.com, whereby consumers can compare fares; they win by getting cheaper travel.

When this progress is achieved through the length and breadth of technology, the same set of winners will be repeated. So why are so many industries still stuck in the past? In my opinion, it’s simply because the idea of top to bottom ownership is so seductive; everyone wants to be Microsoft. However, even Microsoft cannot be Microsoft any longer; their acceptance of ODF, albeit hesitant and reluctant, is a symptom of this. That said, arriving at the promised land of open standards will not be easy; it will require a lot of firms with a great deal of history of bitterness and rivalry to do something which does not come naturally, namely co-operate. However, if an industry as catty and divisive as travel can do it, so can all the rest, and so they will.

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