In article <ev6t35$2sks$1@p...>, 
richard@c... says...
> I know about C#, but I'm afraid I have completely lost track of your
> argument.

You mentioned that Sun's trademark on Java had prevented Microsoft from 
making a variant. I just showed that MS did make a variant but that 
variant was not nearly as popular as the original. So, I helped prove 
your point. As you can see, I'm not actually here to argue. I'm here to 
learn. But I'm not going to just believe that a standard should not be 
protected just because a few people on the internet tell me it shouldn't. 
I have been taking things people say and using it to fuel research in to 
the issue. 


> Java and C# are not an example of purely legal means preventing a
> company from extending a standard; the trademark on Java meant that
> Microsoft would have had to rename their variant, but it was the
> strength of the Java brand that made that (apparently) impractical.

So, since Sun used both legal and moral means to enforce the "standard" 
of Java it is hard to say which did the trick. Perhaps it took both 
together to get the job done and protect Java enough for it to gain a 
real foothold in the market. Now that Java has that foothold, it may be 
hard to see that it needed legal means to get it's foot in the door, to 
really wear out the metaphor.

Perhaps I will need legal means to start out with, in order to keep my 
standard from just getting yanked every which way. I feel that once 
people see the value in what it can do then people will get on board 
regardless of the legal protections. Remember, I am only trying to keep 
the standard itself from forking and getting diluted. I am not saying 
anything about controlling what software people can write to make use of 
the standard.


> To go back to what I thought was the point: there are various legal
> mechanisms you can use to discourage people from extending your
> standard, and they may or may not work depending on things like
> whether you have the respect of your user community, whether you have
> built up a "brand", and so on.  But I doubt you can find any purely
> legal means to prevent people from doing so: I don't know of any cases
> where that has been successful, and I don't think the law *should*
> allow you to.

Well, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks *should* be the case. I could 
patent, copyright, and trademark the heck out of this thing if I wanted 
to and no one would be able to do anything with it. But then that is the 
point, isn't it. No one would *want* to do anything with it. The trick is 
to find the right level of protection without killing the standard or 
letting it fork all over the place, thus becoming worthless. 


> And in any case, we have yet to see this "standard".  We don't even
> know whether anyone will want to use it, let alone extend it.

And you won't for some time now. I still have quite a bit of work to do 
before this thing is ready for prime time. Before then, too many hints 
may inspire knock-off standards to spring up and poison the waters, so to 
speak. Remember, this is not software. This is a standard. The idea is to 
build a standard which will encourage many open source and commercial 
developers to write software to the standard. I am also designing the 
standard so that much of the software could be created by piecing 
together many standard software modules already in existence. This will 
make it even easier for developers to write software.

By creating a total system - the standard, an organizational system, 
reference software, and licenses - very carefully, I hope to create a 
situation where within a few years *quality* educational material will be 
as easily available as bad web pages.