Re: changes and standards documents
Hi,
>>"Guy" == Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:
Guy> To sum up a bit as I see it: RMS's arguments about technical
Guy> documentation are sound, imo. Do the same arguments apply to
Guy> standards? If not, what is the difference between technical
Guy> documentation and a standard.
Technical documentation describes the behaviour and
configuration details about a specific peice of code. It generally
has relevance only to that code. A standard ia about a common set of
rules/api/pracices/conventions that other people can write software
to. Generally, this has the fax-like law: one or two people adopting
it is not of much value, a million people adopting it and it comes
into its own.
The bottom line wqith standards is that people have to accept
it -- and the degree of coperation and synergy that develops when one
can depend on third party code since everyone is playing by the same
rules.
You lose all that as soon as people start tweaking the rules
around. Imagine you have the corba standard. If each client and each
server witer tweaks and improves the standard, then none of the
clients or servers can talk to each other.
Imagine of evryone started tweaking the header sizes of IP
packets. Heh.
manoj
--
On a clear disk you can seek forever. Denning
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
Key C7261095 fingerprint = CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
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