This is a bit of a simplification, one that indeed not many will disagree with.
The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.
A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.
Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).
So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.
>The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.
Not just government, also corporations. How many times, has superior product being ignore because it doesn't have some MS/Google/Oracle (fill in the blank). Current politics in the world does NOT support meritocracy. Doesn't matter if in gov or corporate.
co-author of the ODF spec (2006 ISO) here, I also got involved via NLNet to work with my local standards office to improve OOXML.
The OOXML spec was offered to the ISO standard along an unusual path, a fast standardization lane. Where there was no option for any of the people reviewing it to actually change anything. It was rubber-stamped in other words.
That fact alone doesn't mean it is a bad, but it is a bit of a red flag. The fact is, it is a really bad specification. It is a full 7000 pages long with lots of conflicting details. On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.
To implement a competing application that can use this format you'd not be able to do that from this specification alone. Next to that it is so massive that it is essentially an undertaking that makes no sense. Compare it to ODF which is 1/10th of the size. Has a lot of reuse of concepts and was written under OASIS, a standards organization, unlike the OOXML spec which was written by Microsoft and the full 7000 pages dropped on the world.
I stopped looking at the OOXML stuff for some years, so the next part may be outdated. I noticed that after MS got this ratified by OSI, and thus they dodged the threat of law requiring governments to switch to ODF, they never did an update to the spec even though the applications have seen plenty of new features.
Thanks for the comment. I could imagine that some of the points you mentioned might be related to Microsofts focus on backward compatibility. Some of the points certainly might also have less noble reasons.
"Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish
subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in
favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard."
> It is a full 7000 pages long with lots of conflicting details
> [...]
> Compare it to ODF which is 1/10th of the size
A few things worth noting. First, the size comparison was done by counting pages in the PDFs of the two from their respective standards committees. The OOXML PDF used something like twice the line spacing of the ODF PDF, and may have also had a larger font size. Print the two with the same settings and OOXML still was a lot bigger.
Second, ODF deferred some important things to be done in later revisions of the spec. For example spreadsheet formulas. OOXML on the other hand had hundreds of pages covering spreadsheet formulas, including detailed mathematical definitions and explanations for functions.
> On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.
I believe those were in a draft but taken out in the final spec. Also, I think you might be overlooking what those references were meant to be used for.
There were lots of organizations with lots of documents that were created in older proprietary products like WordPerfect, Lotus, etc, and many of those organizations had reverse engineered or partly reverse engineered those formats and built toolchains around them.
Let's say such an organization would like to switch to ODF. They would have to rewrite their tools but they are willing to do that because an XML format will make future development easier. They will also have to convert their existing documents to ODF, which they can do.
But there are things in those documents that must work like they worked in WordPerfect. For example if they print an old document it may be essential that it has the same line breaks that it did when WordPerfect printed it.
They accept that StarOffice or OpenOffice won't be able to do WordPerfect line breaks but that's fine. Their toolchain can handle document printing. And for new documents that they create in StarOffice or OpenOffice using whatever line breaks those programs use is fine--it is just dealing with legacy documents that requires matching what those old programs did.
What they want, then, is when using ODF as a storage format for their legacy documents for some way to mark in the ODF that the document needs WordPerfect line breaks.
Now imagine two different organizations both are doing this. So they both come up with some way to add to their ODF files that some text needs WordPerfect line breaks. But one of them calls it "WP6LineBreak" and one calls it "LB_LIKE_WP6".
Wouldn't it be nicer if all the organizations that are adding a "Use WordPerfect 6 line break" indicator to their converted-to-ODF legacy files did it the same way? It would make it easier if they ever exchanged legacy files, and it would be less confusing to the rest of is if one of these files ever got into the wild.
I remember some people brought up adding support to ODF for legacy documents early in ODF standardization but Sun was not interested. Their attitude generally was ODF was going to support everything StarOffice needed and nothing more.
Microsoft on the other hand did want to support people using OOXML for legacy document storage, and so they made a big list of the various things from the most popular earlier word processors and spreadsheets that they thought people would be wanting to extend OOXML to store, and reserved some names and markup for them.
They were quite clear that these were not meant to be used by general purpose OOXML word processors or spreadsheets. They were just for people in the scenario described above.
You can wait for the Librem 5 for a very long time, they haven't shipped any significant software update for a long time for mine and its in the state that if you turn on auto-suspend (i.e. don't always go at full 100% CPU) it freezes and needs a hard reboot.
Linux on phone is still very much in the enthusiasts-only phase. Not for me, not for most. And I'm saying that as someone that is a KDE/Linux geek!
Maybe that will change, but for now the e.foundation OS has most definitely a large potential audience that those phones are not going to be able to fill just yet.
Last I checked the forums, Librem 5 works for 10-12 hours on one charge, without suspend. This is mostly fine with me: it should survive a working day and one can buy a spare battery for emergencies. The work on suspend did not stop. Yes, I am undoubtedly an enthusiast.
The design behind yggdrasil is to keep as much the same as possible. I have some projects running on ygg using simple, existing, TCP-socket tech. Works great. So, to get the big issue out of the way. There is a lot of compatibility already there.
The gateway possibility is there, someone needs to do it, is all. There are instructions on the website on how to setup such a gateway on your local router, so you do not need to install the binary on each device to access ygg services.
The main reason why there isn't really anyone really doing this is that this is a research project and most people that use it, use it for their own usecases. Not to offer some websites which aren't already on mainnet.
> their approach still spends 7 bits on the prefix.
The Yggdrasil people are very clear that this is a research project. Not to be used in production, to be used at your own risk etc etc etc.
In that light I find it unfair to claim it spends addressspace. Which, I might add, is pretty darn huge and we are not going to run out of addresses any time soon. If ever.
Maybe pedantic, but needed to point out that the 7 in `0200/7` of the usage is the opposite of being spent. The 7 first bits are the mask you need to apply to indicate that it is INSIDE the yggdrasil address-space. Which means that they only 'spend' 1 bit from from the first byte. Not 7.
> the cryptographic (in)security of Yggdrasil addresses.
Fair enough, I didn't catch that one.
The addresses generated has changed already from 0.3 to 0.4 (which is the series we see today), I expect that something will change again in future to make brute forcing harder.
Notice that in all cases the same IPv6 range was used, reusing the same space as upgrades change the individuals' IP address.
The protocol does not add peers, you will have to look for nearby ones yourself and add then in the config.
If you add more than one, you might start routing between those nodes. Probably Ok on desktop, not so much on mobile.
For next steps, it picks one 'main' peer for your outgoing traffic, based on speed. (once an hour).
On a higher level, the system builds a tree out of the peers that are connected and you send data from one node to the other by directions. Think "left at church, right at heardresser". Or in yggdrasil it is "Go to node 10, then from there to node 1, then to node 5, then to node 6".
In short; a tree is built based on the elected root sending out a package and which peer sends it to you first. Indicating that that is the fastest.
You send data the shortest route though the mesh using local directions only.
Actual traffic is encrypted for the destination peer, so other than some headers needed to route, everyone in the middle will just forward an unreadable blob.
Ygg does not include a DNS, so use IP addresses directly. Notice that in most webbrowsers you need to add square brackets to indicate an IPv6 address.
Also notice that since yggdrasil automatically does end-to-end encryption, a lot of websites don't bother with ssl. So explicitly type http and turn off any plugins that turn your http into https.
First of all, its is a research project. The owners are very clear about that and love to repeat its lack of any guarantees ;-)
Personally I've been using it for a while and its indeed living up to its promises, but ymmd.
It is indeed an overlay network by the simple rule of that being something that people can use. Technically the guys require the underlying protocol to keep order (one after another) in the packages for the stuff to work. Which is why building it on top of tcp/ip makes sense. Note that the ordering requirement is likely to be removed in a future iteration, again this is a research project.
Ideas like doing a mesh using antenna's in your city are thus, for now, out of reach. But the core concepts and approaches will likely map very nicely to such a usecase and the lessons learned as an overlay will help such a future design.
The public network is currently around 4000 nodes, which is why "scalable" is indeed meant to be vague. Tests of a million nodes are going to be required, probably in a future protocol iteration, to make clear statements about how scalable it really is. Signs are good, DHT usage is still very low while we saw a doubling of network size in the last 6 months.
Reading https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/about.html it's even more unclear. They claim to have invented something much better than traditional routing but there is no mention of how Yggdrasing perform bandwidth/latency/cost-aware routing.
If you are interested, I suggest you stop by on the matrix room and chat about the different topics. Its rather large and I'm not a developer on the project, just someone learning from those better than me. Mostly in that room.
The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.
A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.
Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).
So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.