That's pretty much what I remember too. Even the MS products were free to
download. That was one of the aspects of the SGML On The Web project. It
kneecapped the overpriced software market. As I said, XML Is A Good Thing.
It would be a bad thing if the urge to push more corner features into XML
reversed that.
len
From: peter murray-rust [mailto:]
At 04:43 31/08/2006, Len Bullard wrote:
>How many of the original XML parsers were open source?
IIRC most of them - at least that source code was freely available.
The actual licence details may have been different. I can count Tim
Bray's Lark, Norbert Mikola's tool (I forget its name, but it was
seminal in developing XML) and expat and a Java equivalent from James
Clark. Murato Makoto's tools. There was a good deal of stuff from IBM
alphaworks - not sure how much of that was technically OS but it has
inspired the development of apache.xml. I made a consistent appeal
for OS on XML-DEV and I remember when (I think Fujitsu) made
something available with a phrase like "We've listened!... and now we
have released this under OS".
I can't think of many original XML parsers which were closed -
certainly none which were costs-money. But memory may play tricks.
P.
Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
