[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Lessons from the RSS Civil War: The Circle Of Life
I see the pattern perfectly. I question one's obeisance to it. And as I said, I think the case of RSS is spilt milk because no one looked ahead and protected it and the contributors had not developed skills or behaviors that could prevent it. But there are lessons in this pattern and given some of you want to apply what you believe those to be to other spec development efforts, it is prudent to be clear what those are. Ok, I'll tone down the rhetoric but since we are now analogizing: Take Java as an example. Not getting the blessing from Sun just resulted in a Supreme Court decision that enforces the brand such that MS cannot offer a different version of Java. Yet MS is not compelled to distribute Java and nothing stops it from creating a competitor. Seems to work for anyone as long as the initial sources are clean and clear; it may not be comforting to the Java community. The strategy of Adobe with PDF and of Sun with Java was to maintain proprietary rights to prevent forking. This lesson seems to be lost on the grassroots movements until the point at which they decide they must control the specification. Then they have to choose and those who have controlled it and don't like to relent that may have to admit they blundered in allowing open community development and contributors. You may wish to revisit this because none of this affects vendor domination. You may think MS is the only bad guy here, but anyone can dominate a market. Including IBM. They used to be the masters of that game. They may have learned a lot. Because that is based on future behavior, it is my idle speculation. You'd have a heckuva lot better chance avoiding it if you kept your community from fracturing over the process but only a chance. Tim's admonition to pick a good spec org is the best advice he has in his article, and further, one that you are comfortable with the process because little beyond that is controllable in an open environment, and the pattern is, one vendor eventually dominates the market. Is that the circle of life you are referring to? len From: Gerald Bauer [mailto:luxorxul@y...] I guess your rethoric is outdoing even Microsoft or the RIAA. May I remind you that Microsoft steals and blunders as it pleases. In Redhell the call it euphemistically "Freedom to Innovate". > I sincerely doubt a reasonable individual > will not work with an honorable group > to mutual benefit. Take a deep > breath and trust that better results > can be obtained by that tactic. I guess you're an idealist. History and human nature suggests otherwise. Take C++ as an example. Did Bjarne Stroustroup get the blessing from his colleague at Bell Labs Brian Kernighan? Take Java as an example. Did James Gosling get the blessing from Bjarne Stroustroup? Take C# as an example. Did Anders Hejlsberg get the blessing from James Gosling? Take Linux as an example. Did Linus Torvalds get the blessing from Richard Stallmann? I guess you see the pattern here.
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