On Wed, 6 Dec 2017, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Don't know how much time you've spent
on standards committees; I've done
my time. Standards committees are not filled with altruistic folks
working to make something great. Much of the time people are there to
prevent a standard from interfering with their market, or to prevent a
good standard from being adopted. The examples of the NSA participating
on crypto committees to weaken the standards got a lot of press and is
emblematic of what happens. Microsoft has a well documented record of
using standards to screw the competition so I didn't read any goodness
into their joining up. I would agree that they're not the company of
old in that they got themselves trounced by Apple and are no longer top
dog and able to tell others what they're allowed to do.
I'm not suggesting any sort of altruism on the part of MS (or any other
company). I have been very critical of MS in the past and was initially
skeptical when they started to open up. IIRC one of the first signs of
change was when they called the Mozilla Foundation and asked for a
meeting. They met with the Mozilla Foundation and started working on
interoperability. Many in the FOSS community were skeptical but that was
a lot of years ago. I haven't seen any "embrace and extend" for many
years. I'd be interested if anyone else has.
The evidence I'm seeing suggests that today they consider working with
others to be in their best interests.
As you note they can no longer throw their weight around in the way they
used to. No doubt that's a driver for change.
If someone had told me 20 years ago that I'd be sitting here today
defending Microsoft's involvement in FOSS... ;)
Rob
Yeah, I could have put it slightly better, which is that working on standards
is working on standards and doing good is doing good but working on standards
does not automatically equate to doing good.