this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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No trying to be explicitly contrarian, but the EEE strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish) is well known by this point and it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore and falling into irrelevance (as it happened to XMPP after google and Facebook embraced).
I do think it is a design failure, but it’s one that is necessary for it to be open: anyone can enter the space and build features on top of it. So they bring a lot of people, with features exclusive to them and then lots of people migrate because the experience feels broken if you can’t “florp” a post from someone else. It’s the nature of open source vs closed platform that enables the strategy to exist.
It may not happen this time, and I surely hope you’re right, but it would be a shame for the monopoly to win one more time when we had the chance do to something about it but we didn’t. Bringing more people do the fediverse sounds like a dream, but I’m not holding my breath expecting everything will work for the best. There’s a reason they’re doing this, it’s not because they need more users, they already have all of them.
This isn't even remotely true, there are plenty of counterexamples. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, SMTP, PNG, SVG, OpenDocument, OGG, PDF, FLAC, WebM, Vorbis, I could go on at great length. There are a vast number of open standards that are still open and are used extensively as fundamental parts of our everyday lives. Eg, the IEEE standards and RFCs.
How compatible is microsoft office with it?
And how many PDFs are broken by Adobes bs?
I don't use Microsoft Office, so I don't know. Same with PDFs, I don't use Adobe.
There are plenty of programs that handle those formats other than Office and Adobe and I've never had significant problems with any of them.
Regardless, OP said "it always ended up with the open standard not being used anymore." Both of those standards are being used, and even if OpenDocument and PDF had been extinguished it still wouldn't matter because any open standard still being used is sufficient to disprove OP's position.
Emrace-Extend-Extinguish is something worth paying some concern to, but it's not some kind of unstoppable boogeyman. It's failed far more often than it's succeeded.
Same, and neither of us is having a particularly fun time when we get sent a .docx or a strange PDF that refuses to be opened and correctly edited without Adobe Acrobat (not joking, this happened to me once).
Fair point. But both of them suffer from being adopted and then maligned by the corporate entities that picked them up, which is a part of the cycle. First it gets adopted, then "slightly tweaked for features" and then its (usually) unusable on other platforms that dont want to adapt to the corporate vision. Granted, OpenDocument has a different history and both it and PDF are old enough to not actually fear that they will be replaced be corporate "alternatives", but that they did generally follow the cycle but didnt finish it doesnt necessarily disprove it imo.
Absolutely. But that doesnt mean we have to attempt giving it a fair fight. They dont intend to either, its antithetical to the point of EEE.
ODF has been supported natively by Office for years now, and LibreOffice is able to open .docx files just fine.
I've never found a PDF "broken by Adobes bs".
Open, yes, but the formatting will be terrible in my experience.
It has happened to me. Wasnt impossible to solve in the end, but still.
Listen buddy, I don’t think you understand how important it is that I florp my second cousin’s ex boyfriend’s post on the hot new bug patties at McDonalds on sale for $12.99. If I do I get a free bottle of fresh air and a complimentary upper body rinse in the labor hydration station next to the bathrooms.
XMPP was irrelevant before Google and Facebook had anything to do with it.
Agree.