Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!longway!std-unix From: donn@hpfcrn.hp.com (Donn Terry) Newsgroups: comp.std.unix Subject: Re: standards encourage innovation Message-ID: <532@longway.TIC.COM> Date: 4 Feb 90 00:59:03 GMT References: <518@longway.TIC.COM> <515@longway.TIC.COM> Sender: std-unix@longway.TIC.COM Reply-To: Donn Terry Lines: 26 Approved: jsq@longway.tic.com (Moderator, John S. Quarterman) From: Donn Terry >From: tneff@bfmny0.uucp (Tom Neff) >In article <515@longway.TIC.COM> Donn Terry writes: >>I believe that standards encourage innovation. Clearly there are others >>who don't, and I'd like to suggest that they think about it again. >Standards purport to encourage innovation by providing a stable >consensus on which to build, but by nature they also had to bulldozer >PRIOR innovations to be born in the first place. The worry is that new >innovation, however "encouraged," will be similarly bulldozed when the >next standards committee comes around. >It is not EXISTING standards that exert a chilling effect on programming >creativity, but FUTURE ones. I can see the point. However, what would you suggest as an alterative? Every standard was once or will sometime be a future standard. Without standards we get chaos (as eveyone who has bealt with all the variants of UN*X knows). Donn Terry (Shooting off just his own mouth/fingers again.) Volume-Number: Volume 18, Number 45