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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Competing Specifications - A Good or Bad Thing?
 As long as people want specification and standard to mean the same thing, they'll be in a chinese finger puzzle of their own making and chumps to the ambitions of self-selected consortia for standards manufacturing. A spec for a technology that does not yet exist is research becoming product. A standard to converge technologies that do exist because such convergence increases their value to some asset holder (proprietary, open, it doesn't matter to the definition) has benefits which have to be reckoned in terms of that value type to those asset holders. Netscape was/is a product; not a spec. It was never a standard either. It was the beneficiary of some decades of research and the opening of the internet distribution system. It was only the first, not the best or the least, but by no means, standard. But it set an example the market believed was a product of the forces of standardization instead of a temporal convergence of the forces of cheap memory and processors, the opening of the Internet to commercialization, and the free IP. Trying to emulate its success is like trying to be the next Beatles. Hard to do because the same conditions might not exist. Don't buy the mythInformation of Killer Apps. It's a crock. Web services are a redux of earlier efforts at creating networked applications that balance workload. The visions of 'seamless computing' or "frictionless economy" are crocks. That network resources can be made available programatically is not. It seems to me that the web services picture falls apart depending on which problem one wants to solve with a web service interface. If the only web service a system exposes is a query processor constrained to a schema, that works ok under common practices. Security? Not so far. So I think we agree here. Choose wisely the problem to be solved. len -----Original Message----- From: Hunsberger, Peter [mailto:Peter.Hunsberger@S...] Sent: Monday, April 05, 2004 12:45 PM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len); rjm@z...; xml-dev@l... Subject: RE: Competing Specifications - A Good or Bad Thing? Bullard, Claude L (Len) <clbullar@i...> writes: > > It depends on the local issues. A single spec for a > new technology might indicate a proprietary development > ripe for IP exploitation. If it works, why not? Seems to me you're trying to have your cake and eat it to: on the one hand any spec. that is "ripe for IP exploitation" is ok, but OTOH, any spec. that prematurely codifies practice is bad. How are you supposed to know the difference? > Not > everything is in the commons and that assumption of > community property for all things web is one way to > sort out the naive and inexperienced including those > who offer up single spec/single use specifications > labeled or processed as standards. Respect for IP > is the way forward. IP keiretsu in the form of consortia > managed royalty free contributions will work both > for ensuring that submissions are vetted under > participation agreements, and for keeping as much > IP as is workable in the commons of jointly indemified > contributions. Sure, but that seems only peripheral to the issue is when to spec. and how much? A lot of the spec. world isn't about IP, it's about trying to standardize business practices. Trying to use specs. to leverage first mover advantages is a tad like bit like, <bad-metaphor> trying to keep the wilderness pristine by building a theme park in it</bad-metaphor> (though when someone does manage to sneak -- Netscape like -- under the radar, the advantage can be enormous for a while). > People make assumptions. That is how they learn. If > they don't, they fail. Life and death in the ecosystem. > > We got here because too many stopped focusing on developing > software and started playing the standards game. I blame > the W3C squarely for that. This community made its own > problems and this community will have to face up to the > job of fixing the mythInformation it created. Given the ambitions of "web services", the ill defined scope, the previous history of universal interoperability specs of the same nature (CORBA or the OSI stack anyone?) and the ever increasing pressure to get to market I can't imagine why anyone would expect any of this to emerge cleanly or rationally? Every time I preach "how to do a system architecture" it usually includes a phrase something to the effect of "use standards where there is a significant body of best practices that clearly match the business problems you are dealing with". IOW, pick you risks wisely... 
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