On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]> wrote: > I do not see a requirement that anyone can take the specification and > redistribute modified versions as useful. That is what has led to some of > the proliferation of incompatibilities that we already have
Quite so. But at the same time, it leaves the standard unable to evolve beyond the EOL by the original authors. This is something we often stress for Open Source. I have a hard time explaining this inconsistency. > A typical example of an open specification (IMO) is CIF. It has a governance > procedure and is freely accessible and anyone sufficiently enthusiastic > could contribute (though not necessarily formal). How can you informally contribute to a specification, let alone standard? > CML is offered to the community as an IMPLEMENTED VERIFIABLE VALIDATABLE > specification. Anyone who wishes to help with the critical work of creating > reference examples, validation code, unit tests etc. would be highly > welcomed. It's hard and boring and you don't get many publications. It > necessarily has to be COORDINATED. But if anyone wishes to participate we'd > be delighted. So, the arugment that was made on the Blue Obelisk Exchange is how this is any different from MDL molfiles, Daylight SMILES, SMD (I'd never heard about before)... has anyone ever attempted to contribute to those standards (formally or informally), and been refused? > Personally I think that is "Open". It's as precise as the "Open" in "Open > Data" which is NOT a formal licence but an intent. To me, the point of the discussion is to be able to explain which specficiations/standards are Open, and should be promoted, and which not. Egon -- Post-doc @ Uppsala University Proteochemometrics / Bioclipse Group of Prof. Jarl Wikberg Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/ Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/ PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
