RE: ISO intellectual property (was Standards)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Confusion in the user community can be a very 
potent means to penetrate with new products.
Strategy doesn't always lean to the merely 
obvious and user communities often don't 
know what they want until they see it.

Twisty.

Len 
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Bradford [mailto:bradford@dbxmlgroup.com]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> So, embrace and extend is not only legal, it is ethical, right, and should
> be practiced
> widely as long as one does not copy the contents of the web page or the
help
> file.
> Since you seldom care, a simple legal looking letter protects that so it
is
> cheap to keep.

Yes, you can embrace and extend.  Yes, it is legal.  Yes, it is
ethical.  Should it be widely practiced?  No, because widespread
fragmentation doesn't help anyone.  A good example of this is most open
source software projects...  Anyone who wants to can fork off a project,
but this seldom happens because both projects would suffer from it.  The
fact that it would have to fragment in the first place is an indication
that there are issues with the project.  Beyond that, the diverging
feature sets and goals of the projects will lead to confusion in the
user community.  

In other words, OSS authors know that forking can happen, and we try to
do what's right in order to avoid it.  The same can be said for SAX.  It
doesn't need an authoritative body, so long as the contributors are
modeling it after the needs of its user community.