Hi Joseph,
Thanks for the reply and the links and so on.
On your question "What kinds of responses have you received to your talk
from the FSF or other groups/individuals?", I have not received any
responses I can recall. Beyond other factors limiting communications,
perhaps shaping standards is just not on most people's radar screens?
I worked for a time circa 2001 in IBM's XML group who were then refining
the XSL-FO standard. I was working (as a contractor) on an
implementation reflecting the standard in part to help debug the
standard. That standard was mainly about using Formatting Objects for
printing -- similar to generating a PDF file in some ways, but more like
doing that using HTML. IBM said back then that they cooperated on
standards but competed on implementations -- an idea that has always
stuck with me as interesting for its time.
Before that, I also worked for a time in the late 1980s as a Program
Administrator for NOFA-NJ (related to organic certification standards
for agriculture, which thath group was improving locally and also in
interaction with other NOFA groups in other states and with various
levels of government).
So I have some personal experience from a couple different directions
on how important various standards can be in shaping the future -- if a
bunch of people decide to adopt them for whatever reason.
While I am all for free software, it may actually be free standards that
may be making a bigger difference in many people's lives in practice
(e.g. HTML, XML, JSON, ASCII, Unicode, the Scheme language standard, the
C++ language standard, email standards, ssh, sftp, Common Lisp, etc.).
Because if you have a free standard for storing, transforming,
exchanging, or displaying information, then eventually you can get a
free implementations to use those standards.
GNU itself is sort-of an example of this -- a project started
essentially to clone proprietary UNIX as free software. However, UNIX
was not formally an free standard then, even if source code was
available. But UNIX was essentially a de-facto standard in terms of
command-line commands and software APIs.
If the standard itself is proprietary, then you may end up always
playing reverse-engineering catchup. To maintain vendor lockin,
companies may change the standard out from under you with new versions
of their proprietary software that define that proprietary standard.
Granted, free implementations for something (e.g. Python) may also have
an implicit non-obvious free standard in them for a data format or
language that they define in a de-facto way, and which may eventually
lead to other implementations (like other Python variants). SQLite and
emacs may be in some middle ground where they leverage some standard for
SQL or Lisp in some new way, innovating around that standard in new ways
and perhaps defining a new de-facto standard as additions in the process.
A lot of "standards" in the past have been proprietary, where
organizations that promoted standards sometimes charged a huge amount of
money just to obtain copyrighted versions of the standards documents
(perhaps with a license fee on top of that for actually using the
standard). That situation seems to have been improving though as far as
availability of standards documents.
But on the other hand, Software as a (proprietary) Service has made
other things worse. As I discuss in this 2016 essay:
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html
"I recently turned down a job interview with Automattic, that I had
literally waited months for them to schedule, because they insisted I
use Slack for the interview and have switched WordPress.org development
over to using Slack. Automattic used to use IRC and Skype for such
prospective employee chats and for WordPress.org developer chats. I had
hoped to add a real-time component to WordPress via Node.js and
Automattic's socket.io to help make WordPress into a premier platform
for real-time communications, decision support, and sensemaking, and
said that in my application. To me, using Slack to interview with
Automattic felt like it would have been significantly inconsistent with
my stated goals for my work there. Readily agreeing to use Slack at
Automattic just for an interview would also indicate tacit approval of
Automattic's move to use Slack for WordPress.org as if there are not
significant consequences for the WordPress community (a community which
I am part of as a WordPress plugin developer and as a WordPress.org Trac
participant helping identify and fix a significant WordPress core bug). ..."
Ironically, the places I worked instead of Automattic eventually started
using Slack and I was forced to use it to keep my job (although I was
not working on communications tools).
--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
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