Slashdot Mirror
Jeff Jaffe Named CEO of W3C
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.
I have mixed feelings on this. While it's true that he does appear to be fairly biased against the FSF's philosophy, at the same time he also has good diplomatic relations with Microsoft (this could be a good thing). The reason why this could be a good thing is that hopefully (and this is a big hopefully) it will allow w3c to influence Microsoft more when it comes to adhering to web standards in IE.
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.
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.
Read radical news here
"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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
This is my sig.
If you aren't familiar with Jeffe Jaffe, just read his Novell blogs. They're full of the most buzzword-laden bullshit I've ever seen from a CTO who is supposed to know what things are about technically. He certanly wasn't fit to fill Alan Nugent's shoes. While I didn't get the impression from what I'd read that he was a Microsoft apologist (although I certainly wouldn't be surprised), it wouldn't be so bad if I had actually seen him write (or even type) two words of sense together.
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.
What does rope have to do with anything?
Because anyone who suggests an alternative, community-oriented way of doing things must be immediately discredited and comparison to hippies singing kum-bay-ah around a campfire was the best that the GP could come up with.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
You've been asleep for the past couple of years: The WHATWG was formed in response to the W3C's slow pace on HTML standards development. After a few months of prodding the W3C took the point and subsumed the WHATWG's work on HTML5 (formerly Web Applications 1.0). The W3C has been making fine progress on HTML5 and CSS3 of late; whilst the WHATWG does still exist, it's only working on a handful of less-important specifications that won't impact the majority of web designers and developers.
As for the W3C, it's far from dead. If anything it's the WHATWG that's dying: none of their other projects have anywhere near the same community following HTML5 did.
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.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
This strongly worded page at Boycott Novell features copious links to support the above characterization.
So I follow the link in TFS. And? I see a barely coherent rant about "evil enemies of Linux" infiltrating W3C - a bunch of links to that effect, but none to do specifically with Jeff - followed by the part that actually mentions him as the new "evil guy" on the block. The specific quote is "He was chosen despite his love for software patents", followed by 3 links. Of those, only two are actually unique (#2 and #3 are the same link). I reproduce them here, in order, for convenience:
http://boycottnovell.com/2009/02/21/mono-moonlight-novl-strategy/
http://boycottnovell.com/2010/01/31/jeff-jaffe-and-zonker-quit/
Now, here's the thing. Neither one of those even contains the word "patent" anywhere, much less in any citations!
Apparently - judging by the first of those links - the sole reason why they even speak of his "love of software patents" is because he dares to promote Mono and Moonlight.
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?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
Who is this 'we' you keep talking about?
The W3C is a Consortium (that's the 'C') consisting of interested industry members. Right now, businesses who care how web technologies are developed have a vested interest in sitting down together and at least going through the motions of standardising languages and protocols.
The W3C might have democratic mechanisms, but it is neither a populist nor a grassroots organisation. It is, and always has been, an industry body.
I honestly don't know why Tim Berners-Lee decided that an industry consortium would be the best means to achieve web standards. I do know, however, that he chose deliberately and only after consideration. I suppose he hoped that collective interests would trump selfish motives and, if that failed, that other companies could be relied on to reign in the more egregious abuses.
It needs to be said that, in this respect at least, the W3C has been largely successful, but only in the way that standards bodies generally are: Through endless, awkward compromises that sometimes defy reason, and often with only reluctant support from the very people who developed the standards in the first place.
The W3C was born at a time when Netscape Communications ruled the roost, and acted like they didn't need anyone else. Virtually all of the abominations of early 'Tag Soup' HTML can be laid at Netscape's feet. Following that, we saw years of tug-of-war spec development, in which MS and Netscape defined their competing and incompatible implementations of numerous new elements and attributes.
But the W3C persevered and (painfully) slowly managed to bring us back from the brink to HTML 4 and eventually XHTML. There've been some interesting manoeuvres of late regarding WHATWG and HTML 5, but most interesting is the fact that the 'Tag Soup' crew and other unilateralists are more often on the defensive than in control. Much of that - indeed much of the conventional wisdom that Web Standards are Good - is the result of the efforts of the W3C and its members.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?
...
See the løveli lakes.
The wøndërful telephøne system.
And mäni interesting furry animals.
Including the majestik møøse.
A Møøse once bit my sister...
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...
We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.
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 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 resident trolls) who count themselves as members of that "community" are the ass-end of FOSS advocacy.