Michka, > I am mentioning that each person there works for a company which has its > greatest interest in seeinf developed what they plan to sell. The fact that > the UTC itself is filled with linguists and other such specialists is a very > good thing for other scripts, but I suspect that many of them feel at times > like they are speeding and hoping the cop does not see them?
As one of the linguists MichKa is mentioning, I'd say I feel more like someone rushing to spend down the budget before the auditors discover it was credited by mistake. ;-) And yes, while the interests of the companies that participate in the Unicode Consortium include their own bottom lines, obviously, their financial participation in the Consortium is frankly peanuts compared to the longterm payoff they are getting from moving to a universal character encoding. Just look at what moving to a Unicode-based internationalization infrastructure has meant for Microsoft in its trajectory from Windows 3.X to Windows XP, for example. Also consider that there are other interests involved in the Unicode Consortium besides commercial companies flogging software. The research library community is such an example -- they have been involved from the start, and have had a member on the Unicode Board of Directors from the start. And increasingly, governments and other organizations have taken an interest or even become full members. So the Unicode Consortium speaks not only to and for a commercial bottom line in software sales. And even among the commercial software companies, there are visionaries who "get it" about participation in the establishment of the universal character encoding, and its important for the 21st century information technology infrastructure, and who thus don't stint when it comes to the realization that universal also means academic, minority, historic, and yes, even constructed script interests. --Ken
