July 20, 2002
@ 12:58 AM
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Dr. Dobbs, Racism on Kuro5hin and IT standards
Dr. Dobbs

Verity Stobb has finally written her first column of the year and it was worth the wait since it's hilarious yet true as usual. I just found out that I may get to write an article for them sometime soon. It used to be a dream of mine when I was a froshling, that I'd one day be l337 enough to understand the articles in DDJ and now here I am considering whether I have the time to commit to writing an article. How things change. As people back home say; No Condition Is Permanent.

I remember emailing the editors about writing for DDJ about a year ago and didn't even get a response let alone a rejection. *chuckle*

The Purpose of Standards

A number of people I work with seem to have forgotten that technology standards are a means to an end and not the end in itself. The reason people like IT standards is that they prevent vendor lock-in because they lead to multiple vendors. On the other hand technologies that have multiple implementations or are open enough don't need formal standardization because users don't feel trapped or locked in.

This is the main reason whenever I hear us throw FUD about how C# is an ECMA standard and Java is a proprietary Sun technology I can't help but want to retort "but Java has multiple implementations, who can say the same for .NET?". Of course, there are Mono and Rotor but they aren't [currently] on equal footing in same manner IBM's J2SE/J2EE implementations are with Sun's. Hopefully, the decision makers at MSFT will realize that simply creating or supporting a spec created by some standards committee won't automatically satisfy our users and critics.
 

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