Re: Are websites closing down en masse? (distributed free standards and tools)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the reply and the links and so on.

On your question "What kinds of responses have you received to your talk 
from the FSF or other groups/individuals?", I have not received any 
responses I can recall. Beyond other factors limiting communications, 
perhaps shaping standards is just not on most people's radar screens?

I worked for a time circa 2001 in IBM's XML group who were then refining 
the XSL-FO standard. I was working (as a contractor) on an 
implementation reflecting the standard in part to help debug the 
standard. That standard was mainly about using Formatting Objects for 
printing -- similar to generating a PDF file in some ways, but more like 
doing that using HTML. IBM said back then that they cooperated on 
standards but competed on implementations -- an idea that has always 
stuck with me as interesting for its time.

Before that, I also worked for a time in the late 1980s as a Program 
Administrator for NOFA-NJ (related to organic certification standards 
for agriculture, which thath group was improving locally and also in 
interaction with other NOFA groups in other states and with various 
levels of government).

So  I have some personal experience from a couple different directions 
on how important various standards can be in shaping the future -- if a 
bunch of people decide to adopt them for whatever reason.

While I am all for free software, it may actually be free standards that 
may be making a bigger difference in many people's lives in practice 
(e.g. HTML, XML, JSON, ASCII, Unicode, the Scheme language standard, the 
C++ language standard, email standards, ssh, sftp, Common Lisp, etc.). 
Because if you have a free standard for storing, transforming, 
exchanging, or displaying information, then eventually you can get a 
free implementations to use those standards.

GNU itself is sort-of an example of this -- a project started 
essentially to clone proprietary UNIX as free software. However, UNIX 
was not formally an free standard then, even if source code was 
available. But UNIX was essentially a de-facto standard in terms of 
command-line commands and software APIs.

If the standard itself is proprietary, then you may end up always 
playing reverse-engineering catchup. To maintain vendor lockin, 
companies may change the standard out from under you with new versions 
of their proprietary software that define that proprietary standard.

Granted, free implementations for something (e.g. Python) may also have 
an implicit non-obvious free standard in them for a data format or 
language that they define in a de-facto way, and which may eventually 
lead to other implementations (like other Python variants). SQLite and 
emacs may be in some middle ground where they leverage some standard for 
SQL or Lisp in some new way, innovating around that standard in new ways 
and perhaps defining a new de-facto standard as additions in the process.

A lot of "standards" in the past have been proprietary, where 
organizations that promoted standards sometimes charged a huge amount of 
money just to obtain copyrighted versions of the standards documents 
(perhaps with a license fee on top of that for actually using the 
standard). That situation seems to have been improving though as far as 
availability of standards documents.

But on the other hand, Software as a (proprietary) Service has made 
other things worse. As I discuss in this 2016 essay:
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html
"I recently turned down a job interview with Automattic, that I had 
literally waited months for them to schedule, because they insisted I 
use Slack for the interview and have switched WordPress.org development 
over to using Slack. Automattic used to use IRC and Skype for such 
prospective employee chats and for WordPress.org developer chats. I had 
hoped to add a real-time component to WordPress via Node.js and 
Automattic's socket.io to help make WordPress into a premier platform 
for real-time communications, decision support, and sensemaking, and 
said that in my application. To me, using Slack to interview with 
Automattic felt like it would have been significantly inconsistent with 
my stated goals for my work there. Readily agreeing to use Slack at 
Automattic just for an interview would also indicate tacit approval of 
Automattic's move to use Slack for WordPress.org as if there are not 
significant consequences for the WordPress community (a community which 
I am part of as a WordPress plugin developer and as a WordPress.org Trac 
participant helping identify and fix a significant WordPress core bug). ..."

Ironically, the places I worked instead of Automattic eventually started 
using Slack and I was forced to use it to keep my job (although I was 
not working on communications tools).

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."