Re:Facebook Renames to Meta
by tsimionescu on Thursday October 28, 2021 @06:57PM
(#29033122)
It's definitely true that committees can produce terrible results, like the OSI stack. But the committees that I listed didn't just distill implementations into a standard, they also design new features for those projects and actively steer experimentation done by vendors (especially true for the C++ committee).
Re:Facebook Renames to Meta
by Karrot_Kream on Thursday October 28, 2021 @08:47PM
(#29033958)
Right, I didn't mean to disagree with you, I just mean the whole thing is a bit more subtle than just "by committee" or "not by committee".
I think "created or maintained by committees" here is not precise enough. In most of these cases, especially in the case of net technologies, ECMAScript, and C++, a committee came into place only after independent vendors began to blaze the trail on their own. The committee's job here was to take existing implementations and distill them into a standard. This is important because individual entities often have almost no incentive to cooperate otherwise.
However, there are examples of initiatives created top-down by committee that ended up becoming too complicated to achieve actual usage. The OSI Model vs the TCP/IP model [1] is a good example of this failure.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite#Compar...