On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 05:29:48PM +0800, Joel Realubit wrote: > uh, well, what makes a python implementation "python"? or what makes a > TCP/IP stack a "TCP/IP" stack?
Standards are things people and organizations agree upon, that the way we should send packets over the network with TCP/IP should be X, and the way we write code in Python should conform to style Y. If enough people and organizations agree to the standard then the standard sticks. The trouble is MS, having 90% desktop market share, wields quite a bit of monopoly power, so that if they opt not to follow a certain standard, then they've instantly created an incompatible de facto standard that everyone else must then kowtow to. This is what would have happened to Java had Sun not intervened. Fortunately for the Internet, they came too late to the party. They only had control of the future end-users. By the time they were on the scene, the Internet had been operating for years with well-defined and standardized protocols that they couldn't change unless they wanted to be unable to speak to the already existing core infrastructure, and millions of web pages were already hosted that conformed to open standards. Oh, they're gratuitously keeping Internet Explorer not-quite-so compatible with the W3C mandates, but they can't step as far out of line as they might. Had they turned their efforts at the Internet five years or so earlier than they did, the Internet would be a very, very different place indeed. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
