[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Symbol Grounding and Running Code: Is XML Really E xtensi
Yes. Only I can't think of any reason eBay or Google would raise a lawyer's paranoia quotient. eBay goes to great lengths to police the actions of it's users. Google just relies on a PageRank algorithm (possibly patented) that is an opinion meter and even if it seems odd, it also works for most topics. It will have strong competitors, so other than the patenting of the algorithms, I don't see a problem here. Napster is a different case. They set out to enable theft from day one. And they got their heads handed to them for it. And now, people who bought into the 'free lunch' scheme based on theft of intellectual property protected by copyright law are also being caught. That's a heckuva bad place to put the customers. No one is above the law, but one can spend a lot of money postponing the day of reckoning. Sad thing here: the artists. These folks can really do well in a system that funds back some monies for promotion but leaves them in complete control of the product. Napster didn't evolve to that. MP3.Com sort of did. The ManyOne network may turn out to be the next generation there. But this drifts away from the topic into areas I am only tangentially interested in. Indemnity issues are just a part of the overall set of problems that can be made better with code registration of standard software objects where the standards themselves are the guarantors of royalty-free implementation. For XML, this can result in not a change to the XML specification itself, but the use of certain productions normatively in legal specifications. Of particular interest could be the schemas and the namespace xmlns declarations that are meaningful in the context of a wrapper application such as XHTML, X3D, SVG and so forth. The rendering languages are fairly easy to sort out but they do have the problem of their object models: do they have one or not and if not, how to determine the meaningfulness of their combinations and warranty the reliability of their implementations. For this to work, the namespace productions can be used as legal symbols and as URLs. As Alaric points out, RDDL or RDF can have a role here, and yes, the semantic web. In fact, this is one area where the semantic web can really come into its own as a layer describing the object model relationships. The data languages are easier but also where most standards are today. As Jonathan noted, the use of schemas, to which I add, and normative references to these, warranties these if the datatypes are accounted for. It is better if the namespace is owned by a standards body, but that isn't required as long as the namespace owner steps up to warranty on the data itself. This is quite doable and could be the future model for large scale collaborative internet systems and the software industry in general. XML will continue to be meaningless. Applications of XML will not be. That isn't different from what we have today except where the application specifications have no object model to enable one to determine the meaningful combinations. The more I think about it, the more I realize that many of the flaps in the industry today are really symbol grounding problems. If we can make progress in XML with that issue without losing the essential, I agree, nature of XML as a syntax-only specification, we can improve our lives and the lives of our customers. We can stop some of the wasteful litigation. We can push the quality of our products higher by ensuring that when used in combination, they are consistent. XML Doesn't Care. So we have to. This IS a way of managing the lawyers by giving them what they want. len From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] At 4:09 PM -0500 8/13/03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: >As for companies that move ahead without managing their >risks, the fast moving Internet world is still writing >off the costs of their losses. Excuse me, the losses >of their investors are being written off. Many of their >managers retired on the money they took from them. Some of them, yes, Napster comes to mind. It's a fact of life that businesses fail, especially in a free-wheeling, fast-moving area like the Internet where the laws are way behind the times. However, there are also many businesses that have succeeded despite going in directions any typical lawyer would try to prevent. eBay, Paypal, and Google are three examples (now two since eBay bought Paypal.) None of these could have gotten off the ground if they had been conservative about not getting sued. Napster would not have succeeded as a business if it had listened to the lawyers from the beginning. It would never have been started. Laws and lawyers will kill some companies with new ideas, but they won't kill all of them. And the companies that do succeed are far more likely to be the ones that manage their lawyers than the ones that let their lawyers manage them.
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