[Search-l] more than just interoperability

[jer]

Peter Saint-Andre had a great recent blog post, which is very  
relevant to what I believe in for search:

http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2007-05.html#2007-05-30T15:53

Be Open

Is interoperability enough?

Principle Six of the Mozilla Manifesto reads as follows:

The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon  
interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and  
decentralized participation worldwide.

That's great as far as it goes, but interoperability is not enough.  
AbiWord is interoperable with MS Word, email is interoperable with  
SMS through suitable gateways, Ghostscript is interoperable with  
Adobe Acrobat Reader, OpenOffice is interoperable with PowerPoint,  
Ogg Vorbis is interoperable with MP3 through various audio  
converters, and Pidgin is interoperable with AOL Instant Messenger.

But the underlying protocols, data formats, and content are closed,  
proprietary, probably patent-encumbered, and under the control of  
large corporations and industry consortiums like Microsoft, Adobe,  
and AOL. The result? Text, music, video, and communications that are  
less free than they deserve to be, and an Internet that is less open  
than it needs to be for the continued viability of our open society.

When we talk about protocols and data formats, we are talking about  
standards. Standards needs to be open. Sure, MS Word and PDF and  
PowerPoint and MP3 and AIM or MSN are de-facto "standards", but they  
are closed. By contrast, HTML and email and OpenData and Atom and Ogg  
Vorbis and Jabber are truly open technologies and open standards.

The Mozilla Foundation can be a great force for good in the world by  
consistently adopting open standards in its projects, creating new  
Mozilla-based projects (or working with existing projects, such as  
Songbird and SamePlace) that use open standards, and working with  
groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the W3C, the IETF,  
XIPH, and the XMPP Standards Foundation to develop and extend the  
range of open standards.

The long-term health of the Internet is at stake.