Lee Passey wrote:
I understand. There are some people who just can't stand the thought of giving up control. GPLed software is free in the sense of free beer, but not free in the sense of free speech. I need not pay anyone to acquire it, but I can't use it freely; specifically, I cannot combine it with non-free software and charge for the non-free portions.
Wrong. You can sell GPLed software. Red Hat does it. Novell does it. You can too! All the GPL requires is that you GPL your changes too. You take something from the community, you give something back to the community. That's only fair. Taking the community's work freely whilst sitting on your changes is not fair.
What you are suggesting here is a recipe for inaction. The OpenReader format can hardly be called a standard, as widespread recognition, adoption, and employment is still a way off, but _proposals_ must always precede adoption. If no one adopts a proposal until someone else does it first, no proposal will _ever_ be adopted.
Standard, test-suite and reference implementations should be developed in parallel. W3C is starting to require a complete test-suite and at least 2 working implementations for any standard to exit Candidate stage. This is why there always is (and always was) a working PGTEI installation that implements new features before those features get publicly announced in The Guide (which is reference and test-suite at the same time). The OpenReader "proposal" is nothing more than a Calvinesque x-mas wish list (Part 1: from "Atom Bomb" to "Grenade Launcher"). Of course, openreader.org admits the "proposal" are just the jotted down results of a brainstorm. But the press release is a Bowerbirdesque mis-representation of the state of development. It says: "Meanwhile OSoft will turn its XML-based ThoutReader(TM) into OpenReader by next May." The facts are: - there isn't even an OpenReader standard yet. To build that alone will take much longer than May. - ThoutReader(tm) today needs Java and 256 MB RAM. Not what I'd call an ebook reader. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org