[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: ISO intellectual property (was Standards)
Title: First,
balance of powers. It isn't us vs them, black or white,
good
or evil, etc. It is balance: ensuring that no
group
or consortia be empowered to act such that
the
interests of human culture are in peril because they
can
act hastily or without sound reason. It sounds
dramatic, I know, but it is really the tedious details
of how
law and technology interact by consent.
Second, we can't toss words like "standards" into these
discussions unless they have meaning. What
do we
say to those who think SAX should be a
W3C-owned and maintained product? What would
that
help? Do those who originally developed it
but
are not W3C members have rights? If so, what
are
they? Lots of open-list works gets carried off
into
members-only groups. Well-meaning people
enlist
the support of organizations whose policies
and
worse, controls, they don't understand. In
some
cases, controls they cannot or will not see.
Don't
take my position in a largely theoretical argument
as a
like or dislike. This isn't personal and
those
who
want to make it personal are simply thanked
for
their input. I think it important to explore these
relationships down that twisty road because otherwise
we
find ourselves accepting the opinions of the press,
the
pundits, and others (me included, so I accept the
risks
to debate this from an unpopular position).
Because XML is being used to code and
preserve very
large
chunks of the world's
information assets, care is warranted in how it is
designed, created and changed. The Blueberry affair
pushes
certain issues to the surface. When for
example, should an organization be allowed to limit
the
character sets if such limitations would make
cultural assets (eg, the famous Buddhist texts)
disappear? Do the consortia have responsibilities
for
such things? If not, should SGML, an international
standard, be maintained assiduously to ensure in
such
cases, the owners of that information have
another way to maintain it and still make it available?
I have
lobbied for the update and improvement of
SGML. I've done it for years. I consider it the
jewel
for which XML is a setting. It does deserve
a bit
or polishing now and then. Len
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