standards encourage innovation

[Donn Terry]

From: Donn Terry <donn at hpfcrn.hp.com>

>From: tneff at bfmny0.uucp (Tom Neff)

>In article <515 at longway.TIC.COM> Donn Terry <donn at hpfcrn.hp.com> writes:
>>I believe that standards encourage innovation.  Clearly there are others
>>who don't, and I'd like to suggest that they think about it again.

>Standards purport to encourage innovation by providing a stable
>consensus on which to build, but by nature they also had to bulldozer
>PRIOR innovations to be born in the first place.  The worry is that new
>innovation, however "encouraged," will be similarly bulldozed when the
>next standards committee comes around.

>It is not EXISTING standards that exert a chilling effect on programming
>creativity, but FUTURE ones.

I can see the point.  However, what would you suggest as an alterative?
Every standard was once or will sometime be a future standard.  Without
standards we get chaos (as eveyone who has bealt with all the variants of
UN*X knows).

Donn Terry
(Shooting off just his own mouth/fingers again.)

Volume-Number: Volume 18, Number 45