On 04/04/17 11:27, Kerr Mudd-John wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 22:42:16 +0100, Rob Morley  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 20:21:50 -0000 (UTC)
>> Martin Gregorie  wrote:
>>
>>> That was a rather off-topic comment for this NG: apologies.
>>
>> It might have inspired someone to go develop a fault-tolerant cluster
>> using Pi compute modules ...
>> :-)
>>
> Off topic?? there's a thread on the merits (or not) of metric units and
> electric sockets. It's easy to miss the header is "ARMv8.1?"
>
> I'm thinking of getting it vaguely back on topic-ish as Yet Another vi v
> emacs debate!
>
ROFLMAO!

Well perhaps you are right. But its actually of general interest to the
IT community to discuss standards, how to arrive at the best one and
whether imposition of standards is a better strategy than mutually
beneficial adoption of *open* standards.

In general I feel this argument extends beyond technology to the
political sphere: Those who seek to impose political solutions are
either doing so out of naked self interest, or are under the possibly
erroneous impression that their standards are in some way the 'best'.

It is a dilemma in patent law as well. Patented techniques like the
aileron to control roll in early aircraft held back development of safe
aircraft fir those that did not wish or could not afford  to license the
technology. And yet without patents hard working inventors do not reap
rewards and have little incentive to invent.

As with many things, practice is far from ideal. We stumble from one
pragmatic and non-ideal solution to another, because there are no ideal
solutions.

Linux, designed to break patents on Unix, is massively successful but
its now becoming another standards war itself.



--
How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.

Adolf Hitler

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