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Re: Expired swIPe
> But I'm sure
>you know that the development of open standards is more than a
>popularity contest, measured in terms of installed base or variety of
>supported hardware platforms.
Darwinian processes tend to look a lot like "popularity
contests" depending on which eye you look out of. Open standards
(as opposed to artificial standards) need to be relevant, available,
and useful if they're going to be anything other than ignored.
Installed base, variety and support of platforms correlates
directly with usefulness to whatever community is adopting a technology.
I think releasing swIPe was doing us a favor, since it'll give us a
chance to experiment with something concrete, and if it turns out to
be "good enough" (for some degree of good) or repairable it may become
widely deployed -- if it's not, it won't get off the ground. No matter
what, we will have learned something.
> Otherwise, we would have declared IPX
>and DOS standards a long time ago.
I have news for you, Steve -- they *ARE* standards.
The question is "which community?" -- IPX and DOS aren't *internet*
standards because they don't do the job for *us*.
mjr - Software Darwinist.
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