[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
From: "Claude Seyrat" <claude.seyrat@expway.fr>
> > This is what the big players want everyone to believe: that it is
> > innevitable that they should be the leaders. However the open
> > source and free movement has clearly shown that important
> > technologies can grow and thrive based on their own merits,
> > independent of whether they fit into the strategies of the big
> > boys.
>
> Yes but have a look at the market, the sold products are microsoft,
> IBM or others. 90% of the internet browsers are MS. The best schema
> processor is MS... These days very few small technology companies
> are making money by developing technology. How can they even think
> about giving it to a standard. Even to a RAND standard. Let be sure
> that the time to market is not an argument, look at Netscape !
"Look at the market" is hardly a rational response to a comment on
open source or free technology! And, in fact, standards committees
(I have been on ISO and W3C WGs) very often have vital participation
from small or independent players. In the XML world, Tim Bray and
James Clark are particularly notable examples.
It is interesting to speculate that, as companies like MS move to
time-based licensing rather than sales of software, their market
size in seats may shrink (presumably the slack being taken up by open
source systems) but their revenues may actually increase.
> > The extent that MPEG adopts proprietary, licenseable technology is
> > the extent that it fails as a standard.
>
> First MPEG is not a proprietary technology. It is an open standard.
> Moreover, why such strong statement ? For instance, MPEG-1 / MPEG-2
> are both really successfull standard and good technology. We could
> argue also about royalty free standard that were never adopted but
> I wont.
>
> Anyway, I will not continue this discussion as it shows the lack of
> understanding and subjective positions, probably because you see ISO
> as the standardisation evil.
On the contrary, I have served on ISO WGs for several years, and
currently am the editor of a part of ISO DSDL, (the part which is standardizing
Schematron, a schema language that is completely unencumbered.*)
I like ISO, I especially like the discipline of one-vote per nation.
ISO should not act as a marketing arm for purported owners of IP. In fact, I think
I will recommend to our national body that all technologies with undonated IPR
should be voted against, as a matter of policy regardless of their technical merits.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
* AFAIK, except in the extended case where you might be using
it to generate hypertext links between an external schema or specification
and an instance, in which case XLinkit's patent might apply -- and in
which case you might find XLinkIt is a far more satisfactory tool.
|
