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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Good Times Ahead for "Sharecroppers"? (Was: [OT] Ti m Bray
 MS has its own designs. So do others. When they figure out they aren't winning, they embrace or withdraw. That is competition not corruption. They can come to the table with a lot of firepower and that scares people. The Internet was held together for the first two and half decades by being pretty much the property of the American Department of Defense and when you only have one important customer, it is fairly easy to keep things stable. In 1990 when they dropped it, a band of brothers took over and created their own fiefdom: the W3C. From customer to boss. What is strange to me is that people are so afraid of Microsoft that they will expend so much energy there. Sure, it is a fact of culture-making that shared paranoias are a feature of the hazing rituals, but they end up making the same mistakes made on RSS and now son-of-RSS. They run from one uncertainty to the next instead of disposing of the one uncertainty the market will use: ownership. If they make the mistake Userland did, they co-opt. If they do what VRML did, they find an organization to work with them. OTOH, I've seen small communities stand up to MS and win and still get MS's begrudging support. VRML did it. MS got madder than forty wet dogs, but it didn't do them any good and their attempts to put a competitor in (Chrome) failed because the VRMLers had a good solution that was in the sweet spot of capability and cost and they found an easy legal means to protect the asset. It depends on the strategy for disposition of the standard or specification. Leave that too open and not only MS but IBM, Sun, etc. will walk right over and take it. And deservedly. If syndication really is the nextBigThing, expect an aggregator and free publishing tools to be bundled into future products from IBM, MS, Apple and so on. Will they be RSS compliant? Sure. Will they be son-of-RSS compliant? Sure. Will they enable ad sales? Sure. Will they be extended by perfectly legal namespaced XML tags? Sure. Is that corruption? Nope. That is what XML enables and the web thrives on. Some think the web a community; I think it an information ecosystem and undirected ecosystems are cruel. Directed ones can be but at least their is a locus to be modified. It isn't that others don't contribute. That is expected. It is what they expect to get or keep for contributing that one might question. My only point in all of this is that planning for that from day one is smart. Leaving that to fate is not. We created the environment in which BigCos thrive. We have to be at least as smart about how to do that too. Many a sharecropper did successfully get their own farm. It was a way to get started. Many a sharecropper lived their whole lives comfortably on those farms. Others moved on to bigger and better things. The Smart Ones. Taking MS or IBM head on isn't smart. Using them to get what one wants is. That is what they and their products are there for. T&Cs are negotiable if one goes to the table with something of value. If one made it worthless by failing to protect it, that is one's own lack of smarts, not theirs. len From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@z...] i'm sorry len, but i couldn't disagree more ms put a lot of effort into corrupting so many early efforts (remember msn was going to be the real computer network, not the current internet?, c# will replace java because it runs so well on every computer (sic), .net is all i need to rule the world, etc) and really "gave in" to the standards efforts and the success of the open and simple ethernet and tcp/ip protocols and standards. in fact the internet's success is really the success of non-proprietary efforts, especially the rfc's - yes ms contributed, but so did lots of others. bit then that's why this is such a healthy list, we've all got opinions and prejudices and in that mix somewhere is a good result for all. 
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