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[homepage.git] / blog / data / 2009-02-18-protokoll-og-format.txt

diff --git a/blog/data/2009-02-18-protokoll-og-format.txt b/blog/data/2009-02-18-protokoll-og-format.txt
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--- a/blog/data/2009-02-18-protokoll-og-format.txt
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@@ -1,25 +1,30 @@
 Title: Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
-Tags: english
-Date: 2009-02-18 11:50
-Publish: 2010-01-01
+Tags: english, nuug, standard, debian
+Date: 2009-03-30 11:50
+Publish: 2009-03-30
 
-Where I work, one of the decisions 
+<p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
+very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
+simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
+open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
+Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
+thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
+avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
+application.</p>
 
- - on network protocols and exchange formats
-   - open standards is a clear advantage
- - give support on applications
-  - allow other apps
- - allow us to change clients and keep the servers, or replace the
-   servers and keep the clients
+<p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
+independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
+use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
+protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
+is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
+application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
+blocked from doing so.</p>
 
- - smtp
- - imap
- - nfs
- - ldap
- - ntp
- - X11
- - syslog
- - ODF
- - text
- - html
- - rst
+<p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
+users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
+best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
+requirements change.</p>
+
+<p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
+open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
+application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>