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Standards bodies or open marketplace

One of the things I’ve kept my mouth shut on - is the proceess of how standards evolve.

Unelss it’s not completely obvious - I am of the opinion that ONLY the marketplace matters. Did Flash or Director ever become a ’standards body condoned’ standard?

Would you consider Flash a standard?

I’d say so - though a debate would erupt as to what happens when slimeballs CONTROL your standard. But regardless - Flash is a standard and it was never condoned, supported or acknowledged by any standards body.

Same thind with RSS.

So it’s a fairly controversial subject to bring up - but Sam Ruby approached the mRSS list with “why aren’t you guys coming to the IETF or W3C?” question.

David Hall replied.

Sam replied back.

I just wanna say to Sam……


“Sam we love you. We love Atom and we love what you’re doing. But let us finalize the spec, get marketplace uptake and do our thang WITHOUT bringing in professional standards guys - who go to standards meetings cause that’s their job and who put bureacracy onto something that needs to be driven by the marketplace. Remember SDMI? CD-I?”

That’s my public stance on all this.

Once we got something, I’m in favor of going to a standards body and making it official - but not before it exists. We’ve got a long way to go with coalescing media standards.

In fact - I can tell you I started on this journey back in 1988 - when we founded the ‘Chinatown Group’. I wonder if any of my readers were there?

Anyway that was - what - 17 years ago?

The board forced me to ‘hand it’ over to a standards body - called MMC - and it was dead within two meetings. So no, Sam - we’re not gonna take mRSS to some standards body - yet.

OK?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 6:08 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Standards bodies or open marketplace”

  1. Mark Pilgrim Says:
    July 2nd, 2005 at 6:59 am

    Atom was developed outside a standards body too. The only version in public use (Atom 0.3) was released in December 2003, and it was implemented by all major content providers and feed consumers several months before the IETF got involved. As I recall, we hadn’t even decided which standards body we wanted to use until shortly before the IETF accepted the project.

    Certainly, IETF participation (both on a personal level of the individuals involved, and the process of working within the IETF guidelines) helped us decide on some important issues for Atom 1.0. But unless I’m very much mistaken, the IETF-approved version of Atom is not (quite) final and no one is using it yet.

    So I’m not really sure what your point is.