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Len,
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>>From: Patrick Durusau [mailto:pdurusau@emory.edu]
>>
<snip>
>>All I was suggesting was taking care of a goose that is already laying
>>golden eggs. The one Turner is suggests exists is somewhere off in the
>>bushes, if there at all. If that were not the case, Turner and others
>>would be citing real numbers to make their case.
>>
>
>Microsoft and Turner have repeatedly contributed to that nest. They
>are good citizens. They are simply saying that having no RAND option
>is not a good way to induce others to cooperate given a situation in
>which the greatest good for the greatest number is contrary to their
>good. So the future of the W3C will be best if they are careful
>not to undertake specifications in areas where the dominant stakeholders
>hold patents they are unwilling to surrender. The W3C could end up
>with wanker specifications while the market created by it is served
>by proprietary technologies. So be it.
>
I understand that Microsoft and Turner have contributed to the common
good. What I disagree with is the view reported as held by their
customers that RF standards are not good for them personally. Perhaps
that is true in very limited or closed systems, but that has not been
the experience with web standards thus far, or at least no one has yet
cited any evidence to the contrary.
I realize that it is easy to say that licensing software/patents will be
greater "their good" but if that were really the case, other than a lot
of loose talk there would be some hard evidence to support that view. I
am not an economist but I don't think all the claims that new business
models are evolving are just talk. The model used by MySQL, for example,
would have been unthinkable in the mid-1960's. Does not mean that it
will last but the evidence that something has changed is too great to
simply igmore.
I don't think the W3C will lack for standards to write that are
important and don't infringe on IP as the next generation of markup
languages and technologies remain to be written. Vendors who support
that sort of furtherance of infrastructure, as has Microsoft, Sun, IBM
and a host of others, will be the first to profit from those new
languages and technologies.
I think there will always be a lot of important work to be done at the
W3C and vendors with better business advisors will be supporting it.
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu
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