[whatwg] about rich internat applications

[Ian Bicking]

Didier PH Martin wrote:
> Yes the open source mantra. Can open source components be the source of a
> sound business model? (I mean here something that help people pay their rent
> and live with). What is more important, get access to lousy code or get
> access to a components and a vendor having interests to keep us as
> customers? Without any religious positions I think its better that we have
> components available from a marketplace and some competition among the
> vendors. If the code can behave in a sandbox with good security checks I
> have no problems to not having access to the source code as long as I can
> complete a project on time and with reasonable costs. The best it to allow
> some choices: for philanthropic buddies, allowing them to expose the source
> code and for others allowing them to hide it.

While we can get into philosophical and economic arguments about 
distribution models, I think WHAT is intended to present incremental 
improvements based on core features of the web.  The standard for the 
web is transparent text formats that can be analyzed, reverse 
engineered, and reprocessed by third party tools.  It seems like an 
entirely unnecessary scope creep to expand the goals into areas that 
would allow closed-source extensions.  Copyright law clearly allows for 
proprietary but source-visible code, and proprietary Javascript does exist.

--
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org