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.
Mixed Feelings (Score:2, Interesting)
Obviously this can go the other way as well, with IE imposing its standards onto w3c, and forcing the spec itself to change/adapt. Pray to RMS that it goes the way of the former.
How about? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Break out the tar and feathers (Score:4, Interesting)
"Microsoft apologist"... is that like a "communist sympathizer"?
If Communism is a single, unified organization with both a multibillion-dollar budget and many experienced PR people dedicated to providing its own apologia, then yes the two terms have a lot in common.
Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
I have had queezy feelings about the W3C for some time now and this just makes them even sicker. At this point, I would rather almost have the FSF friendly browser makers create a standards body that is, well, for those people that are interested in open systems and not playing leverage games with it.
I reminded of what became of OpenGL, when a cool little company tried to make a nice standard for everybody and instead the whole thing got hammered by a bunch of egos until it was more or less abandoned in mainstream Windows based 3D rendering.
Finally, I wish people could see that patents and lengthy copyrights are less free market than what we have now. You can say a system is free market when it is really a hodge podge of government subsidies and monopoly grants. I would propose that FSF people start calling themselves Free Market Services, and simultaneously label closed shops as Government Regulated Services, which is really what they are.
Oh, HIM (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't fathom how people like that get jobs like this, what on Earth he is going to do (conversations with Tim Berners-Lee are likely to be cut rather short) and why this is deemed to be news. It's just another nail in the coffin of the W3C to have an idiot CEO like this.
Re:How about? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
That's only the case because we are doing this market thing backwards. Specifically, the corporations involved have more power than their customers. So instead of listening to what their customers want and creating products in response to this demand, they produce the products first that serve their own interests and use clever marketing (and take advantage of existing marketshare) to artifically create demand for them. The result is that things like IE are on a take-it-or-leave-it basis that is not open to negotiation.
If the customers frankly had a bit more backbone when it comes to being treated as a resource and didn't allow themselves to be manipulated for their marketshare/mindshare so easily, it would be the other way around. The W3C would be relevant or irrelevant based on whether most Web users and developers had faith in it. If most Web users and developers had faith in it, then the option available to Microsoft and Mozilla and other organizations would be simplified: abide by the standard or be ignored and fall by the wayside. I don't imagine this would be a problem for Mozilla, but this would require that Microsoft change the way they do things. If that happened, it could only be to our benefit.
Re:A Little History Lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
The W3C might have democratic mechanisms, but it is neither a populist nor a grassroots organisation.
It's better than some. For one thing they are very committed to having debate and discussion take place in open forums, with email discussion and F2F meeting notes available to the public. This is the polar opposite of the closed door process Microsoft has lately preferred.