More like locked out
The standards processes enormously favor large companies, because they have the resources to send people to meetings around the globe, and the patience to wait the years it takes for them to get baked, and they don't really care about what Schwartz writes so passionately about -- user choice. In fact, they prefer if they can lock users in and still conform to the standards. That's why the standards tend to get so convoluted, to allow lock-in while providing the appearance of conformance.
Ask UserLand sometime how many competing UserTalk implementations there are. Also ask them where the documentation for the Frontier "object databases" are, so that you could write programs in a different language that access the root file. Then ask them where the "open formats" that aren't wire protocols, which, the last time I looked, were all pretty accessible and residing in various W3C recommendations and RFCs. So no advantage for UserLand there.
Oh, you could also ask Manila users how much choice they've got.
Update: it's been brought to my attention by Rogers Cadenhead that UserLand has indeed published an API for the object database. I stand corrected. My bad.
Comments
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/2003/04/09.html#a635
Posted by: Rogers Cadenhead | April 9, 2003 10:24 AM
'Salright. I'll bet I'm one of the only big-time Radio UserLand geeks who knows about the effort to open up the object database.
Posted by: Rogers Cadenhead | April 9, 2003 2:33 PM