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<standardDisclaimer>It's Friday afternoon and
len is going off again. Delete to protect your
valuable time.</standardDisclaimer>
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Bullard, Claude L (Len) scripsit:
>> Ever wonder why a consortium needs to be private
>> if all of the competitors of worth are members?
>> Who or what is the monster to be feared in this
>> cartoon?
>Their own managements, to be sure. By maintaining secrecy, W3C technical
>folks can prevent press wars.
But it doesn't work. The ugly press wars
start anyway. And when the W3C didn't like
the web services notions, other consortia
with the same members but different policies
were created. Smart agents don't keep
doing something that doesn't work. That is
akin to comparing babboon behaviors to chimps.
Babboons have no impulse control. Chimps are
better at that one. So it would seem the
W3C member managers consider themselves to be
a tribe of babboons, all get up and go and
no ability to keep from stomping the babboon
to their left when chasing a gazelle, thus
losing the gazelle. When that doesn't work,
they form a tribe of chimps.
And it has not prevented the concentration
of the power and the money mostly in the
hands of a very few parties. In fact, it
accelerated it. Cui bono?
At the end of the competition of the hoimnids
to become the dominant species, only one was
left standing. (ref. Walking With Cavemen -
Discovery Channel, produced in England I think).
Why are humans the only species left? Violence
or the traits that lead to enabling complex
systems that enabled weaker members to survive
only emerged in one line? Imagination added
to the capacity to see self as other?
Is the W3C cro-magnon or neanderthal? Where
are the rest of us in this picture? Using
the tools made by... which?
Whatever we say, some of the members are quite
adaptive in shaping the environment to meet
their own agendas and getting the rest of us
to go along with it. What was it T. Lawrence
said: "The preaching was the most important thing."
No, I think they and TimBL were lead to a consortium
style and it worked for those that lead them there.
It has been successful over a short term for managing
assets and getting a lot of important open technologies
launched. I do fear that if one looks deeply into
who benefits by that, one will find there are both
public and private interests at work, or as my Dad
used to say, "when it comes to keeping moonshine
illegal, the preachers and the moonshiners are in
it together".
The same system that enables public communications
enables theft of private property and total information
awareness. That was the danger my CALS mentors warned
me about when building global hypermedia systems over
TCP/IP and the Internet were discussed before the
Web was created: it's a system with no real safeguards
built in at the get go, so by the time the users realize
the trap, they are in it.
Cui bono?
len
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