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

[Joseph Turner]

Hi Paul!

"Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com> writes:

> 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 think you may be right about that.

[...]

> 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.

I agree with you about the importance of open standards.

> 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).

In your blog post, you suggest Matrix as an alternative.  Why not XMPP?

Thank you!

Joseph