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At the end of Walter Perry's presentation last night, C. Michael
Sperberg-McQueen suggested that Walter was describing a "Hobbesian world of
processes in competition...each process for itself", while for himself,
"call me a corporatist", he preferred to work with processes based on prior
agreement.
After too many years of working with web browsers, which share a common
agreement to some extent but which still have dark corners, I know that I'm
inclined to doubt the prospects of large-scale distributed projects run by
competitors proving genuinely willing to abide by the terms of the
contract. Contracts in the United States often start with the best of
intentions, but but sometimes turn into battlegrounds, specifying the terms
of engagement in a more bellicose style than was originally intended.
I'm curious at this point how the "XML project" of agreement-building is
proceeding. In most of my own work, I find that either I don't bother with
contracts (my own rules files, which others have been able to adapt to
their own needs) or the contracts sort of partially work (HTML, DocBook at
O'Reilly).
Are most people working on building agreements across communities? Are
they working on the I-publish-you-discover approach common to smaller
efforts and formalized by things like WSDL and (to a lesser extent) RDDL?
Personally, I'm happy to support prior agreements when all parties agree
about the nature of the agreement and are willing to continue supporting
that agreement over time, but I have some deep suspicions about the nature
of agreement that leave me suspecting that technologists and technologies
often live in a Hobbesian world. The results are less difficult than those
Hobbes predicted: we don't all seem to be living the "nasty, brutish, and
short" life, nor do I see much need for us to throw ourselves before the
mercy of an all-powerful tyrant, which I believe was Hobbes' solution [1]
to the ugliness of this world.
[1] - All quotes from Hobbes are from a quite likely hazy memory as I
approach a decade since I last seriously read or wrote about Leviathan.
Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue
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