On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Daniel Zaharevitz <[email protected]> > wrote: > One of the most valuable sets of specifications is the IETF drafts. They > have no legal force but they are explorations of whether a particular > specification would be useful to the community. Utlimately with time many > become de facto. They are characterised by > > "rough consensus and running code"
Lot's of consensus and running (open source) code around Daylight SMILES, Symyx molfiles ... Is the above but sufficient requirement? > It's had widespread use and is essentially an Open Specification. If people > want to add more files they can mail Henry and they'll get included. It's > not "Open" in that Henry controls the web page but that is a narrow and > legalistic view. AFAIK no-one has raised any concerns in the 15 years it's > been up. Put simply, it works. Yes, chemical-mime support is indeed nice. > I am happy to draft some principles which address what an Open Specification > is. There will not be a legal definition because that is not possible, > especially in a distributed community like the BO. The main purpose of the > BO in proposing Open Standard/specs was to highlight the value of having > references of documents which we do our best to conform to. If we can't > conform, then maybe we need some other course of action. Some guidelines would be nice, and all I have seen around Open Standards do not clearly enough distinguish between some standards tagged and and others not... if the Blue Obelisk claims to support Open Standards (or Open Specifications), I think it would help if it would be clear what is what... clear rules is important, and statements like 'we tried, but were refused' is nice, but too open for interpretation, politics and whatever... I'm personally fine with intentions, but trying to sell intentions does not go well in legal environments; it simply scares away people/organizations if there is a legally safer route... the CML/Artistic License 1.0 or 2.0 has been discussed now, but quite crucial to, for example, Debian packaging... mere consensus is not always enough. 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
