Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C 145
blozza2070 notes the news that Jeff Jaffe has been appointed CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. Until January Jaffe was CTO at Novell and, while his name hasn't come up very often in this community, he is one of the architects of the Novell-Microsoft patent deal. A reading of Jaffe's blog while at Novell tends to paint him as a software patent supporter, Microsoft apologist, and no fan of the FSF. This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.
Nothing good ever came out of having (Score:2, Insightful)
good relations with microsoft. neither for their partners, nor their consumers.
and if ie imposes its own standards to w3c, we developers are going to ignore their standards. its simple as that.
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:2, Insightful)
it will allow w3c to influence Microsoft more
Or do you mean allow Microsoft to influence W3C more?
How does it feel (Score:0, Insightful)
How does it feel to know that your arrival precipitated the death of one of the world's most important standards setting organizations?
This guy should be fired before he starts. Then the people who hired him should also be fired.
MSFT is pushing Silverlight (Score:1, Insightful)
...so why would they care anymore whether IE will ever be compliant as long as corporate IT continue to make IE the default browser?
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we break away from the W3C and its strange policies and instead appoint a community-based chair with people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera, Google, Microsoft (if they would show) and anyone else who wanted to make a browser. I'm not really seeing the benefit of the W3C lately, and with this, why don't we just break away?
The main reason to not do that is that you probably won't get either the (main) browser makers or the users to show up. Without them, you're simply irrelevant. But if they do turn up, you've effectively got the W3C (with maybe a round of musical chairmanships at the top). Lot of fuss and bother to achieve nothing of value.
Re:Nothing good ever came out of having (Score:1, Insightful)
What a bunch of crap. Developers don't disregard standards just because they came from Microsoft. Hopefully nothing ridiculous will become a *standard*, but if it does, developers should boycott it because it's stupid and not who it came from. And if Microsoft comes up with a great idea (ahem, XmlHttp/AJAX?), maybe it *should* become a standard because it's a good idea? Oh but if Microsoft came up with it, we should ignore it... can't have that...
The problem isn't necessarily "Microsoft standards", it's people not following standards (which Microsoft has been quite guilty of, no argument there).
If things become standards, and people start just ignoring them and doing their own thing (again, as Microsoft has done in the past) how are they any better than Microsoft was and how does that avoid the whole non-standardized web mess again?
Answer: it doesn't, and we end up with a mess. Not everything that becomes a standard is going to please everyone, but good communication with the big players is important so that sound ideas become standards (no matter who comes up with the ideas), and that people agree to follow those standards so technologies can play along with each other.
Re:Break out the tar and feathers (Score:5, Insightful)
So are you referring to IBM? Oracle? Intel?
Those three don't seem to have the online fanclub that Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) seem to have. The times I have seen stories about Oracle or Intel or IBM misbehaving, there were not nearly so many people who came out of the woodwork to defend them or make excuses for them as when a similar story appears about Microsoft. But for any who do this for the companies you mentioned, I'd say the same thing applies (leading me to wonder what your point was). If you are suggesting I am picking on Microsoft, I ask you one question: when it comes to abusive behavior that does not benefit the public, is the name of the corporation really important to you?
I personally feel no need to spend my time defending a corporation that has large budgets and legions of advertisers, PR people, and lawyers dedicated to giving it a good public image whether it actually deserves one or not. I have no rational explanation for the motives of people who do feel such a need. I suppose some of them may indeed be astroturfers but I don't think that's a satisfying explanation. It doesn't explain the genuine "fanboy" nature of much of this behavior, and I (would like to) think professional astroturfers could do a better job than most such posts I have seen on Slashdot. Personally I think it's typical "us against them" behavior like you see among sports fans who root for different teams, and about equally unsophisticated.
That I don't mention Linux or GPL'd software in general here is quite deliberate. I don't know of any authors of GPL'd software who are in a position to force their software or their standards on anyone. The very nature of it makes that difficult if not impossible. Therefore, there are no such abuses like embrace-and-extend coming from this group that would require apologists in the first place.
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:w3c outliving its usefulness (Score:5, Insightful)
The links between W3C and the corporations that actually implement technology used on the web are one of the things that make it useful as a standards body.
If the major vendors weren't involved in the standards body, it would be an academic exercise with no impact on the real world.
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
Can I get a +5, Insightful for repeating part of the parent post, too? Dude, he already said that.
Wow, you're right, sorry, I didn't read the whole post before I commented...but...this is slashdot, isn't that a requirement for posting? Who actually reads articles? /. is a forum for half-baked, half-assed opinionated remarks written solely for the purpose of starting flame wars. At least that is what I was told when I signed up years ago.
I don't think the AC was blaming you for writing that. I think he was blaming the moderators for promoting it. You probably didn't read the article or the summary, and yes that is rather typical around here since people are generally more concerned about comment visibility than they are about things like readability, useful non-redundant contributions, or factual accuracy. Style over substance is highly prized in superficial societies and all of that. But it's expected that moderators shouldn't be in such a hurry and should do a better job of considering whether something really deserves one of their limited points.
I think that AC successfully trolled you without even intending to. You might or might not have a sense of humor that finds amusement in that, but I do.
Re:Nothing good ever came out of having (Score:5, Insightful)
we developers are going to ignore their standards. its simple as that.
Bravo! Well said! In support of this stance, I'll be happy to take care of any of your clients that are foolish enough to want their websites to look and function similarly across all major browsers. Viva la revolucion!
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
But the problem is, they rarely do. Generally Microsoft's ideas start out just fine, then they play the patent card, extend features and end up with a product radically different than their specifications. The problem isn't that Microsoft is making the standards, it is just because in recent years Microsoft hasn't made a single, decent, workable standard without playing the patent card.
Agreed. It's not an issue of acceptability of standards. Microsoft has lots of talented employees to whom it could assign that task. It's an issue of trust. Time and again, this company has proven that it will act in its own interests (which is acceptable from a corporation) to the detriment of everyone else's interests (which is not acceptable from anyone).
Meanwhile, it has given few or no examples of honoring the purpose of open standards. There's simply no reason whatsoever to believe that this time they really intend to play fair and be honest, and by that I mean the-truth-and-the-whole-truth honesty. It's an amazing example of collective stupidity and/or a collective short memory that anyone even pretends this is a question. It might be comedic if it didn't cause so many complications for so many people.
Naturally Microsoft doesn't have to bear the cost of those complications. When it decided long ago that IE would not follow standards very well, this forced many Web developers to expend a great deal of extra effort to handle IE's incompatibilities. Let X equal the amount of time and effort it would take to design such a Web site for a single universal standard to which all browsers adhere. Let Y equal the (larger) amount of time and effort it took to design such a Web site that handles IE's intentional incompatibilities. Do you think Microsoft has ever had to pay for Y - X? In principle this makes them a lot like spammers, not in the sense that MS sends tons of unsolicited e-mails, but in the sense that others have to bear the cost of their marketing.
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
A good thing for Microsoft maybe. Expect the W3C to start saying the IE way is the standard anyday now.
Re:How about? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you think the W3C is? It’s exactly that! And believe it or not, parts of the most important standards even came from Microsoft people. They are not all evil, you know.
I’m very happy that we now, for the first time, finally have all browsers support one single set of standards (XHTML 1.x / CSS 2.x / DOM 2 / JS), by listening to the W3C again. Instead of the chaos of the entire 90s and 00s!
What strange policies are you talking about? I find the work of the W3C nice. They care. Which is obvious, since they are the browser makers, amongst other interested groups.
Are you even a web developer?
Re:Nothing good ever came out of having (Score:3, Insightful)
I think what he meant is that if Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome all support one way to add a new feature and IE decides to support it in a different way, the W3C shouldn't make the IE way the standard one.
Talking about that, where's Opera's support for box-shadow and border-radius? They're at version 10 for crying out loud.
Witch hunts (Score:3, Insightful)
I love the smell of witch hunts in the morning. That guy wasn't a "key architect" of the Novell deal, he wasn't even part of the company's leadership when it was finalized between Hovsepian and Ballmer. What he did do for many years was run the openSUSE project. But why let facts get in the way? The submitter of this flamebait (because what does one call it?) is one of BoycottNovell's groupies. He hangs out on their chat room as "ender270" and is currently in the middle of a legal dispute with David Schlesinger, one of the members of the GNOME board of directors - who incidentally was also attacked by BoycottNovell - subsequently the proprietor "Dr." Schestowitz was forced to issue an apology [boycottnovell.com] for that.
But of course, his crime is that he dared work for Novell. For this he should be punished for all eternity.
BoycottNovell and the 12 people (including one of our past [slashdot.org] resident trolls) who count themselves as members of that "community" are the ass-end of FOSS advocacy.