2011/11/15 Ken Whistler <[email protected]>: > Many hundreds of people have been volunteering time now for 23 years to > help in the development of the Unicode Standard. But the fact that major > information technology companies also see it in their economic interest > to assist in the development of the standard, and even more importantly, > to *implement* the standard, is a *good* thing, not a bad thing.
I do agree, provided that the standard itself is sufficiently open to allow competition, including from small companies or individual and non-profit organizations, that have their own "economical" interest too, to get solutions that won't cost them arms and loose critical money they need for other important missions not supported by the standard itself. Anyway, for-profit companies can see interests in helping to develop standards: they have a very insteresting input from their customers, if they can participate too, to make better products that fit their needs and solve real-life problems. Standards are there to help eveyone, because they have different missions and usages that still must find some interoperability. Bad interoperability of solutions is a major source of costs to everyone, and source of costly and lengthy work for all, just trying to constantly resolve the same problems. But the interesting question is the scope of a standard: if it's too large, it will try to solve too many unrelated problems with the same solution, and there will be little alternative. For this reason, a standard must absolutely remain in its scope, and take lots of precautions before trying to extend this scope, otherwise it will break other standards also used by other people (and frequently the same one when the standard becomes ubiquitous like Unicode). -- Philippe.
