Comments on: A Proprietary Web? Blame the W3C http://www.techconsumer.com/2008/07/09/a-proprietary-web-blame-the-w3c/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 10:20:26 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Tom Caswell http://www.techconsumer.com/2008/07/09/a-proprietary-web-blame-the-w3c/comment-page-1/#comment-4109 Tom Caswell Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:07:37 +0000 http://www.techconsumer.com/?p=964#comment-4109 The WC3 is an easy target for your argument -- a "straw man" for you to knock down. And while their timetable is definitely pathetic, I've worked around enough standards bodies to know that few of them are really on the cutting edge. Have you every wondered who pays for "free and open?" Nobody. Most of these guys all have real jobs and do this Open Source Software stuff because they want to. Mozilla does a fantastic job with Firefox, but remember that this code is only there because a bunch of people have enough spare time and motivation to build it for free. So don't be too surprised if all we have are a few basic frameworks for AJAX. (Apparently that's all the OSS folks have time for, or they would have built an IDE by now.) Paid, proprietary software tends to be more complete and often beats OSS to market because the OSS guys have to have day jobs to get paid and eat just like the rest of us. The WC3 is an easy target for your argument — a “straw man” for you to knock down. And while their timetable is definitely pathetic, I’ve worked around enough standards bodies to know that few of them are really on the cutting edge.

Have you every wondered who pays for “free and open?” Nobody. Most of these guys all have real jobs and do this Open Source Software stuff because they want to. Mozilla does a fantastic job with Firefox, but remember that this code is only there because a bunch of people have enough spare time and motivation to build it for free. So don’t be too surprised if all we have are a few basic frameworks for AJAX. (Apparently that’s all the OSS folks have time for, or they would have built an IDE by now.) Paid, proprietary software tends to be more complete and often beats OSS to market because the OSS guys have to have day jobs to get paid and eat just like the rest of us.

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