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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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