

Wikipedia Founder: Free Knowledge requires Free Software and Free File Formats - Tsiolkovsky
http://jimmywales.com/2004/10/21/free-knowledge-requires-free-software-and-free-file-formats/

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zdw
File format compatibility is why some industries are stuck in the grips of
certain companies. For example, lawyers historically were glued to
Wordperfect.

The problem going forward is that it's happening again - companies that want
customer lock in are totally willing to build new formats only they
understand. I think this is going to hit us hard in the medical sector, which
not only has a lot of proprietary, non-conforming implementations of standards
that were designed by committee, but a huge amount of legacy data and
equipment that people are used to using.

A local hospital, for example, just jumped to a windows only GUI interface
with 2 different web interfaces, all of which are broken on non IE platform.
And it's considers "state of the art" and "best of breed".

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rafski
Leeches? Not the best choice for a comparison.

Leeches are free medicine, as opposed to today's as-closed-as-it-gets
med/pharma industry. They are still in use in official medicine, not only in
the form of synthetic blood anticoagulant hirudin.

There's quite little information on hirudotherapy on Wikipedia, no mention of
the range of beneficial substances leches' saliva contains (other than
hirudin) and no mention of e.g. benefits of iron depletion through
bloodletting.

This might be considered controversial medicine, but dismissing medicinal use
of leeches sounds a bit off to me.

But I might be totally wrong, I am part of the Wikipedia generation too after
all :)

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intellection
Poverty-friendly.

Good policy.

Let us transcend our great poverty of understanding.

------
known
free != open

~~~
intellection
Bang.

