On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 06:12:18PM -0500, Meng Weng Wong asserted:
There is no one reason the Mystery Stakeholder is behind XML.
Partly they are promoting their pet technology because they expect to
see it everywhere five years from now, and why not do it here too?
Partly they are promoting it out of convenience --- maybe they may
already have an XML parser inside their MUA and a working implementation
based on XML, so it's less of a hurdle.
I would prefer that it integrate with qmail because I'm lazy too.
Partly they are promoting it because it furthers their business
interests at the potential expense of their competition, which is
simply what corporations do. It's a pain in this case because the
Mystery Stakeholder has so many business interests their competition is
pretty much anybody who's not them.
This is as it should be from the corporate perspective. But it is a
hinderance to rapid, widespread adoption because of the likelihood of an
IP claim.
I have a new appreciation for professional politicians. Stopping spam
is something that everybody wants, and we see how hard it is. Imagine
doing something that lots of people *don't* want.
Hopefully, you'll appreciate it from afar. Step too close and you may get
something on you.
Now, what is our goal? If the goal is to stop spam, then we should
allow the expediency factor into our arguments. The Mystery Stakeholder
controls the desktop and they are so well integrated that they can roll
out their antispam technology across their entire product range,
comprising the MTA, the MUA, the ISP, the webmail portal, etc etc.
Voila. They could do it, and it would be done, at least as far as their
market is concerned.
My goal (can't speak for anyone else) is certainly to stop spam, but to do
it in an open (non-patented) way. My reasoning is simple, i don't want to
run Exchange or any other over hyped behemoth when a smaller more elegant
solution can fit the bill using less costly hardware and less support
resources. My interests are self serving too, so I can't blame the
mystery vendor for trying to funnel the discussion their way.
SPF has the advantage of smelling right, and there the admins will be
the ones pressuring their managers to publish.
If they were interested in the technology with a desire for world good,
they wouldn't hide their agenda. I don't believe that I should expect
them all to be philanthropists, but I will voice an opinion to keep the
specification simple and task specific. Anyone can embrace and extend
a standard at their own risk.
Maybe our goal is to stop spam in accordance with the cultural norms of
the Internet community. You ignore culture at your peril. They teach
that in all the MBA classes on international management. When you don't
absorb those lessons, you get accussed of imperialism. The Mystery
Stakeholder is no stranger to those accusations.
My wife told me I lack culture. Maybe that's why she left?
But what can we really do against the Mystery Stakeholder? The only
thing that go up against a gorilla is another gorilla. We need to get a
big player or players on side. That gets into Big-Company Politics and
where we are all out of our depth. If the other players support SPF,
they will do so for reasons of their own. The big-company decision
makers aren't on this list arguing their case because (1) we're not even
on their radar, and (2) even if we were, they'd have minders and NDAs
and so on, and this is too public a forum.
Linux was no gorilla when it started. Dell was no gorilla either.
But the avalanche has not started.
There is still time for the pebbles to vote.
Here's to hoping that the ripple will be large enough too be seen.
--
Bob Greene
Public key available at
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xC9C7841C
Or, you can just pull my finger
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