Re: Economic Self-Interest (was: Re: combining: half, double, triple et cetera ad infinitum)

2011/11/15 Ken Whistler <kenw_at_sybase.com>:
> Many hundreds of people have been volunteering time now for 23 years to
> help in the development of the Unicode Standard. But the fact that major
> information technology companies also see it in their economic interest
> to assist in the development of the standard, and even more importantly,
> to *implement* the standard, is a *good* thing, not a bad thing.

I do agree, provided that the standard itself is sufficiently open to
allow competition, including from small companies or individual and
non-profit organizations, that have their own "economical" interest
too, to get solutions that won't cost them arms and loose critical
money they need for other important missions not supported by the
standard itself.

Anyway, for-profit companies can see interests in helping to develop
standards: they have a very insteresting input from their customers,
if they can participate too, to make better products that fit their
needs and solve real-life problems. Standards are there to help
eveyone, because they have different missions and usages that still
must find some interoperability.

Bad interoperability of solutions is a major source of costs to
everyone, and source of costly and lengthy work for all, just trying
to constantly resolve the same problems. But the interesting question
is the scope of a standard: if it's too large, it will try to solve
too many unrelated problems with the same solution, and there will be
little alternative. For this reason, a standard must absolutely remain
in its scope, and take lots of precautions before trying to extend
this scope, otherwise it will break other standards also used by other
people (and frequently the same one when the standard becomes
ubiquitous like Unicode).

-- Philippe.
Received on Mon Nov 14 2011 - 18:41:09 CST