On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 1:14 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
Don't know how much time you've spent on standards committees; I've done my
time.
So true for many of us on this list ;-)
Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks working to
make something great.
I would modify that to be: are not ALL filled
There are some members that want the right thing and yet can be conflicted too.
I remember at an later /usr/group meeting (before we became the POSIX committee) we were discussing case folding. From a historical stand point case flowing is left over from the 60s when files names were stored in 5 bits and ASR33s could not easily generate upper and lower case - as I like to point out in Kindergarten, kind Mrs Munger taught there was big A and little a and they were different.
Anyway, at the time it was interesting the two folks from DEC were really conflicted. All of us there agreed that case folding was a no-no, but thanks to VMS and the layer DEC was starting to develop, they knew that it was going to be a fight inside of DEC.
Doug's observation about malloc(0) and mine on case-foldin; the problem is 'self interest' - when is the 'good of the community at large' out weights the good of the on; but the one just happened to have the largest economic incentive.
If I recall when we started that work, Sun might not have yet existed or was at its infancy. So the big player was DEC, and we were trying to get HP, IBM, etc. to join to fray. The economic argument won out, we wanted to big guys with us if we were going to succeed, so we backed off that requirement.
Political flame to follow ...
This is why things like Net Neutrality matters IMHO. Doing the right thing for everyone, means a few big players have to make changes that cost them money. They don't like being told to do that. They are applying the economic golden rule (he who has the gold, makes the rules).