RE: [xml-dev] Should the XML "recommendation" have an expirationdate?

[Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org>]

On Sun, 2013-03-03 at 15:28 +0000, David Lee wrote:
> We should start with the various national legal systems, see how that goes :)
> * All laws shall expire after 10 years unless voted to re-instate.
> I think that would be awesome.

Expensive though. Even just a vote in a parliament is a costly event
really.

I could see "unused" laws expiring, so that after no-one had set a ship
on fire for 50 years it would no longer be punishable by death... but
maybe then people would say, "Hah! Now's my chance!" and dive right in.
So to speak.


> But seriously, how does ISO differ from W3C from a business
> perspective ?
> I am always a tad curious what the real business of standards
> committees and how it varies across committees.
> Is it ISO or maybe ANSI that charges for standards documents ? I
> forget which.

ISO charges for documents... I don't know about ANSI, but national
standards bodies vary from country to country in that regard, and in
whether government-funded work is openly available, copyrighted, etc.

> That income then funds future development.
Well, it funds the ISO secretariat - ISO doesn't really have a technical
staff.

> W3C doesn't charge for the standards, instead gets income from members
> ( who in turn get to influence the standards).

We also get income from the four host organizations.

> That  business dynamic may well influence the concept of retiring
> standards as opposed to simply not working more on them.

It might - if sales of a spec are generating revenue, why obsolete it?
But it'd also be a candidate for new work (e.g. consider SQL).

One of the constraints for W3C is that a lot of Web technology comes
from the open source world, where an entry fee of even just a few
hundred dollars for specs can be prohibitive.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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