RE: [lemonade] Standards Process (was 'Notifications for multiple devices per user')

[Mark Crispin <MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU>]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Zoltan.Ordogh at nokia.com wrote:
> If we were living in a perfect world, I would agree with what You just 
> said here a 100%. But we live in a world where money talks. And it is 
> the users who has the money - including You and me(*). Client/server 
> vendors, operators all make a living from their money.

You are also supposing a perfect world; that specifications are faithfully 
implemented, and thus if you sucessfully ram through a specification it 
will happen, no matter how vigorously someone objects to it.

There have been many incidents in the past in which vendor A decided that 
vendor B's implementation is a threat.  To respond to this threat, vendor 
A implemented technical means that targeted vendor B's product, and did so 
in a way that made the fault be in vendor B's implementation.  This put 
market pressure on vendor B to "fix" the problem.

Sadly, IMAP has not been immune.  The IMAP community has been better than 
some (think HTML), but we've had our own vendor sabotage-wars.

Such wars leads to no good for anybody.

The ONLY way to avoid this is for EVERYBODY to cooperate in good faith. 
If objections are raised to a proposal, those objections should not be 
airily dismissed ("there was some reason").

For a proposal to succeed, there must be concensus among all parties that 
it is a good idea, or at least not an objectionable idea.

The worst proposals are those which are "simple for me, so I don't care 
that it is not simple for you."  Almost as bad are proposals which 
duplicate existing functionality, but better please someone's sense of 
esthetics.

MOVE is an example of the former.  Trash is an example of the latter.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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