Blogs

Tags > zip

Is ZIP in the public domain or not?

What is the IP status of ZIP? This is a question of interest to standardizers and developers implementing standards, because so many new standards use ZIP. ODF and OOXML for example. Here is what the current PKWARE site says (with...

PDFXML versus XPS versus SVG Print?

I think we have to be much smarter in how we think about standards. It is easy to think about them in terms of agreements or libraries or mandates: all planned and directed activities. But I don't think that will work in this kind of case, where there are multiple, rival technical ecosystems. They don't want to agree. They have fans who don't want to look at alternatives. And they all are probably open enough to squeeze under the rosy gate of legitimacy from a public policy view. So to get convergence we need some other strategy. I suspect that the situation with SVG Print, PDF and XPS is the same as with OOXML and ODF: the route to convergence may not happen at the level of markup harmonization at all, but instead by the support of plurality.