[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Dave]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 15:02:43 -0400, Dave Collins
<dcollins at phoenix-interactive.com> wrote:
> 
> So, in a nutshell:
> 
> a grassroots world community has found something truly useful, inclusive
> and free, and a large corporation has come along and is attempting to
> corner it, brand it and charge a subscription fee.

hmm? While I buy the socio-economic ramifications to Longhorn, what I
don't buy is the utopian metaphor for Mozilla. People believe that OSS
is just as capital earning as closed software, but that its open
nature means that monopolozation is less likely and thus opportunities
are increased.

That being said, I think there is another issue here. <sticking head
out of shell slowly>What if, IF!, Longhorn is all that and it brings
to market what any OSS couldn't imagine doing in the same timeframe at
the same level of support and professionalism?
What if, the web is ready to die as we know it and it is time for a
new technology to come along and better it? No one is really morning
the death of Gopher, eh?

Its been a while since I argued this, but isn't the network (the
Internet) more akin to NTSB and less akin to a software license any
more? I mean imagine if every TV maker used different protocols for
interpretting TV signals? It would be a mess, no? I mean aren't we
reaching a point where we just gotta let the better app/solution win?
I'm sorry but would we be all high and mighty if Beta won over VHS as
it really should have?

I'm just not buying the cry for Mozilla tone being presented here.
Personally I have tried Mozilla and Safari and can honestly say I
prefer the results as an end-user (not developer) I get w/ IE. As a
developer, I much prefer just picking one of them (any of them) and
honestly IE gives me more options than the others do and has been
giving me those options for a longer period of time so I'm used to
them.

I just think that we OSS for the front-end has shown me no successes
to date as a designer trying to solve real world problems compared to
the closed solutions in my life: IE, Flash, Java, etc.

-- dave