| James Giles 2006-09-20, 4:01 am |
| Jan Vorbrüggen wrote:
>
> Well, perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree.
>
> For me, standardization is a public service. A few participants will
> participate out of the good of their hearts, but most will do so
> because they expect to profit more from having a standard in place
> than if it
> were not. Still, by the nature of the beast the rest of the world can
> profit from such a standard being place without having contributed.
> As such, the actual participants have no obligation to enlarge
> participation of other, less interested people unless they perceive
> it to be to their personal benefit - which in many cases they do not.
And those vastly more interested, but without corporate support?
But, thank you for making my point. As I have said, those who
complain that the committee doesn't represent their needs and
there's nothing they can do about it are correct. It's rather like
having decisions made by a very exclusive club and having the
members argue to continue that exclusivity.
>
> Then so be it - apparently, they are wasting their time, in your
> considered opinion, but it's not for you to tell them how to spend
> it, is it?
???
I'm not telling them how spend their time (or money, or anything
else). I'm telling you that they are not going to squander their
time on something that has a very expensive front-end cost
and only speculative long-term benefits. If the cost for at least
*some* degree of participation were considerably less, there
would be more participation.
--
J. Giles
"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare
|