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Re: Microsoft-phobia and the non-future of XHTML x.x [LONG]

• To: AndrewWatt2000@a..., xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Microsoft-phobia and the non-future of XHTML x.x [LONG]
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:06:12 -0800
• In-reply-to: <154.17d2605d.2b0f704f@a...>
• References: <154.17d2605d.2b0f704f@a...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016

Andrew, people develop open source software for a variety of reasons.

  1. Love of the process.
  2. A need to take a greater control of their tools.
  3. A way of getting publicity or improving their egos.
  4. A way of commodotizing Microsoft software or competing with Microsoft.

In my personal experience, the higher up the list you are, the better 
the software you produce. So for instance the programming languges Perl 
and Python were created by people who I have met several times and I 
know that they have no hatred for Microsoft whatsoever. In fact 
Microsoft employees have worked side by side with other developers on 
Python stuff, and a tremendous amount of effort has gone into making 
Python work well on Microsoft platforms and with Microsoft software 
(even when "working well" means working around bugs in the platform).

If James Clark and IBM announce a new open source project on the next 
day I will trust that the James Clark version will be better, as long as 
he cares to improve it.

People do this for the pure love of it, and conventional economics 
impinge only occasionally and in oblique ways. It is therefore very 
dangerous to apply standard economic thought to the process. A start to 
understanding this phenomenon is to read the writings of Eric Raymond.

AndrewWatt2000@a... wrote:

>
> One key aspect of the problem is the relationship between the income 
> that  browsers generate (~nil directly) and the costs of high quality 
> development. If we want high quality browsers or rich-clients then 
> someone has to invest substantial amounts of money.

I'm sorry, but that is fundamentally untrue. No organization or 
individual has to invest substantial amounts of money if the development 
model is decentralized.

> Without income (directly or indirectly) we can't expect substantial
> investment.

Also false, and demonstrably so. Where is the income for Gnome or Emacs?

> That aspect is quite simple ... if software companies can charge for
> next-generation browsers / rich-clients / call them what you will then 
> we as users can expect added value to be part of the pay off.

That's insanely wrong-headed. Why would a centralized, closed-source 
model necessarily produce more value than a decentralized, open-source 
model? Have you been paying attention for the last ten years???

Look, Mozilla is getting better, faster, than commercial browsers. 
Between spam blocking and popup blocking, excellent standards support 
and many different models for different users, it is making great 
strides. Opera is going head to head with IE on smartphones and winning.

The browser development stall is over and we're just about to get back 
to the good old days of rapid improvement. Why would we change anything 
just when things are starting to get good!?!?

  Paul Prescod

• References:
  • Microsoft-phobia and the non-future of XHTML x.x [LONG]
    • From: AndrewWatt2000@a...

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