[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >One thing to think about is how standards have changed.. It's no
> >longer big vendors in a room deciding what "the standard" is (i.e.,
> >the top down approach). It's more the developers (largely in open
> >source projects) deciding what "the standard" is as a side
> >effect of writing their code.. How do we adapt to the new reality?
>
> I think you have a warped view of how standard were created even in
> the old days. Standards by and large codified existing practice;
> if it was done by large vendors it was largely done by them as
> a result of writing code *first*.
Well, the main difference to former times is that these rooms are now open
and the OpenGroup mailing list is used by developers and not only by
representatives of large companies.
This helps to avoid wrong decisions. Look at e.g. the streams standard that
has not been implemented before it was standardized. After Sun did create
a streams based driver for terminals with SunOS-4.0, it turned out that
it was not possible to even implement a standard UNIX terminal driver correctly
using streams because it was not possibel to switch between the cooked
and half cooked mode without loosing characters. These days, more developers
with programming experiences are welcome in such commitees and help to avoid
this kind of standardization.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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