Conversation

Notices

1. Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 09:23:28 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

   I’ve said it a long time ago. The ActivityPub WG at W3C must spring into action NOW and prepare itself for the big corporations that will try to overtake the standard. The core members should make sure that transparency and openness is turned to 11. No backroom dealings. A very clear IP policy that requires royalty free etc.

   • Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 09:23:26 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer For more on why this is read Manu Sporny's blogposts on the topic

     this one especially, "Rebalancing how the web is built":
     https://web.archive.org/web/20200120154851/http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/
     and a bit more focused on a specific case with what happened to the Web Payments group (it was shocking for me to see):
     https://web.archive.org/web/20200115004913/http://manu.sporny.org/2017/w3c-web-payments/

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 09:23:27 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer The *usual case* at the W3C is that corporations overtake the standard, the only reason that didn't happen with the SocialWG is we were considered a laughing stock at the time, they were sure we couldn't succeed

     Now that they want in, it'd be different

   • Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Mar-2023 09:23:54 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer It could be that with the restructuring towards being a 501c3 that this could be getting better but I'm skeptical

     note that I like to post to Manu's posts because they are *empathetic*. Like me, Manu really likes many of the people who are working at the W3C and knows that many of them really do believe in their mission, despite that the organization ends up being compromised repeatedly (EME is the biggest example).

     The reality is that standards organizations should be perceived as a a commons, and our society is not well structured to fund the commons. Trust me, as a person who's been in the constant work of scraping together funding to advance FOSS-oriented decentralized networking tech for over a decade, it's rough. And it's easy to be compromised for reasons that are easy to finger-wag at from the outside. Fundraising is so stressful, and finding a funding path that allows you to stay clean is... hella hard