xml-dev - Re: what Napster means for XML

["W. E. Perry" <wperry@fiduciary.com>]

I'm sorry, I don't follow this at all. There is an initial moment when the only
copy of SAX offered is the one on your laptop, connected to your cable modem.
While that copy is available--an hour, a day--dozens of interested parties will
download it. Some of those interested parties will then offer it for download,
unaltered, on varying schedules from their own machines. Others will
incorporate it in derivative works which they will, in turn, offer for download
on various idiosyncratic schedules and which will, in turn, be replicated and
re-offered by others. The net effect is that 1) a copy is always easily found
somewhere; and  2) it is practically impossible to find _all_ of the copies, to
destroy, suppress, or censor them. This seems to me to replicate exactly how
SAX has, in fact, been disseminated to so many by being incorporated into CD
compilations which are bound into books on XML, to make their way to the public
through hundreds of different business pathways. This distribution model not
only scales to any imaginable demand, but it exactly replicates 'real world'
business, where in any trade or profession hundreds of competing practitioners
offer either generically similar or slightly differentiated versions of their
particular goods or services.

Respectfully,

Walter Perry


David Megginson wrote:

> Further to Tim's point, Napster is a special case because there's an
> extremely high degree of redundancy: even a moderately popular song
> will show up on dozens or hundreds of computers at once.  Since most
> of the time many people are chasing relatively few (say, a few
> thousand) songs, it doesn't much matter who you get the song from.
> Note that there are still central servers to help you *find* the song
> you want.
>
> For general information exchange, this model would not work so well.
> What if SAX were available only when I happened to have my notebook
> plugged into my cable modem?


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