Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael S Czeiszperger <czei AT webperformanceinc.com>]

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On Friday 07 September 2001 11:54 am, you wrote:
>       The key word here is "proprietary".  Most technical standards like
> railroad gauges, 60 hz AC, and so forth are established by agreement
> among several players within a given industry and controlled by the
> government (NSI) or trade groups.  Most industry standards are
> established and managed openly.  Microsoft wants to establish standards
> for a huge segment of our world and control them from behind closed
> doors.  Brutal, yes.
>

I've found that the open source movement has taken focus away from open 
standards, which is unfortunate. With open standards, it doesn't matter if 
you have access to the source, since anyone can implement the standard, and 
there's no question of ownership. Companies can cooperate with regards to 
defining standards, and then compete on the quality of the implementation.

Open source without open standards isn't quite as useful, as source quite 
often isn't cross platform, and can be quite complex so the protocols, file 
formats, etc, can be obfuscated.

The next big thing to look at in terms of standards is .NET. Microsoft will 
make C# the language a standard of some sort, but in typical fashion is 
hiding the fact that most of the C# code won't run on non-Microsoft 
platforms. The reason is only the bare language itself will be a standard, 
not the libraries, and the libraries will mostly be wrappers around existing 
Windows APIs, which are proprietary. This way they can claim to support 
standards, while making sure that no one will either be able to implement a 
competing product, or port the C# libraries to other platforms.

- -- 
Michael S Czeiszperger
czei AT webperformanceinc.com

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