Brokekid.net

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You Are the Messenger

A keynote speech is hard to write. Some come off as walking advertisements look at our product offering, see the cool technology, buy it and hire us to write your applications for it. Some become exhortations toward noble causes, give to the poor, feed the hungry, make technology work for those who cannot be otherwise helped. These may make you reach for your wallet more likely than the first, but the message that they contain is also subtly insulting that it is the technology that is ultimately important, and that when these poor unbenighted savages are just given the keys to the castle, they will soon be kings. Rubbish. Having occasionally flirted with poor unbenighted savagedom, I can tell you that in general what is far more important is a very real, very human helping hand and a respect for their dignity that’s more important, not a cheaper computer or a better graphical interface.

So I guess that, instead of high flown rhetoric or a shill for the next big thing, I would like to talk a little bit about …

YOU.

In this day and age of IRC and e-mail, you would be called “The SVG Community.” That means that, for the most part, you spend as much time, perhaps more, talking with people half a world away about the difficulties of getting viewers capable of rendering real time animations (or even not-so real-time) animations, the building and binding of component architectures, the glacial speed at which the standards process moves or the latest Adobe/Macromedia merger than you do discussing local politics, the current scandals involving high priced sports figures or the dating problems of the latest curvaceous actress.

I hate to tell you, but there’s something just a little bit … odd … about you. Most people, at the end of the day, walk out of their office cubicles and their office lives at the glass office door. It’s just a job, after all. You … you read documents with titles like “Compound Document by Reference Use Cases and Requirements Version 1.0″ … and what’s worse, you read them at home, and get spitting mad when you come across something that seems assanine. This is not normal behavior!

So why do you do it? Huh? I’ll hazard a couple of guesses here. You do it in part because the subject is fascinating to you the idea of intelligent pictures is, when you get right down to it, one of those subtly archetypal images that smacks of hobbits and dragons, and the idea that you can make that happen is admittedly pretty cool. Yet even that doesn’t quite explain it all … after all, Macromedia Flash did the same thing nearly seven years ago, and multimedia applications have been a staple of computing for a long time.

Personally, I think there’s something else there that is in, it’s own way, much more important, and it is the same reason that I do this too that I am as much of this community as you are. You do it because you care about the future. You do it because you realize that ultimately locking up our words and images the two things that ultimately make us human – behind the walls of proprietary software and proprietary institutions hinders communication, lock people without the means to buy into the “game” to a form of fiscal servitude … that or risk falling into the information abyss.

The notion of open standards is an odd one, one that is sometimes difficult to explain in light of the more well-known open source software, and its a comparatively recent one. For many years, companies have conducted business by exploiting the differential between information formats, either by making it too expensive or troublesome to switch to another format in order to assure lock-in to that company’s technologies, or by providing those conversion services themselves for a price. A standard is in essence an agreement to speak a common language. An open standard is the further agreement that anybody can speak that same language, that one didn’t need to speak some form of secret “club-speak” known only to its members.
Riffing on Open Standards

Open standards is a powerful concept, and it works against the status quo. A number of big companies have given lip service to such open standards as SVG in a few cases even making a serious effort in that direction — then backing away as they began to realize the potential danger that may emerge to their own software efforts. Smaller companies (and many open source communities) on the other hand recognize that their best strategy is to make their products utilize open standards that can in turn be used with an increasing constellation of other products and projects that also use these standards. They are admittedly forced to compete on that one quality that most companies prefer not to compete on quality. To these companies I’d say “Guys, I’m sorry about that, but I’m frankly a lot happier seeing you compete on quality than on the degree to which I have to rely upon your product because I can’t move away from your format.”

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