When we created ODF 20+ years ago, Microsoft first laughed at the committee at OASIS, then made OOXML to render it moot, then rigged ISO to make OOXML a standard, then implemented ODF and now participates in the ODF committee and helps fund its work through COSM.
#Bluesky is Twitter's OOXML to #ActivityPub and it's at the "rigging ISO" stage.
I share these not to dig at Microsoft but because I was involved in both cases. There are others, by other vendors.
There are however more examples of embracing an existing standard and succeeding against competitors by driving its adoption than there are of creating a competing standard to retain monopoly control.
@webmink disclaimer: I’m not involved in it at all, but, I think it is coming from a very different angle i.e. I don’t get the sense that it is trying to make “a Twitter version” of something that exists (OOXML was arguably, let’s make an XML version of Office formats and then the others will follow our standard, not the other way around). I think the starting point they chose around identity rather than content/activity is interesting. Plus, blockchain. I need to do more research, for certain!
@andypiper Do you think there was any attempt to embrace ActivityPub? My sense was it was scorned...
@webmink @andypiper My own sense is that Twitter built their business on "open" APIs that they later closed. They know what could happen if devs actually adopt ActivityPub, so they tried to hobble adoption by starting Blue Sky.
@webmink @andypiper I think they couldn’t figured out to monetize it.
OAUTH2 is an easier target then AP since people are accustomed to “Login with Twitter/FB/GitHub”.
I can see them building something like a scrobbler for everything which would feed them data, people just need to login with twitter and accept a predatory TOS.
Blockchain may actually be useful for establishing a chain of trust, not that this has been successful, but it also has the affect of binding people to a single signing key which correlates their activity to them directly.
It could even be used for something like DRM on content, or people would need a certain amount of bird coin to do X.
@webmink @andypiper American-led companies tend to spurn European-led projects... almost as a rule.
I hear Canonical made some mistakes w its tech, which of course isn't going to get constructive engagement from those paragons of engineering.
@webmink I have nothing meaningful to contribute but thank you for laying it out like this, that's beautiful
@webmink It's great getting these sorts of insights. Thank-you.
@webmink patience and consistency are the most important, yet underrated superpowers in times of clickbait and quarterly driven companies ;)
@webmink Yeah, but M$ was the pass master at this stuff for DECADES. I'll never forget when they bought SCO Unix for the patents thinking they could sue Linux out of existence.
@bradysflungtablet That's not quite what happened. Microsoft never bought them, just $12M of Unix licenses.
@bradysflungtablet @webmink Oh man! Remember Darl McBride?
@atomicpoet @webmink 😂🤣😂 Oh yeah. Thought he was gonna patent troll IBM outta their shoes.
@bradysflungtablet @atomicpoet I'm still not 100% sure it's over. The zombie keeps twitching.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/30/sco_tsg_vs_ibm_settlement/
@webmink Bluesky may have some interesting elements in it that would be worth incorporating with AP into a new standard.
May be too early to tell tho since the code release is barely an experiment.
@polychrome
It's possible, I agree; AP certainly needs some thought on identity mechanisms and also encryption. However, I think we are in the SVG scenario here, with Twitter showing negligible interest in working with the existing community.
But i'm very skeptic about how many for the public useful things can come out of such a development... mhh
@webmink My impression is that Microsoft has gotten better on these things. It is still not a very Open Source friendly platform though.
In any case, I'm glad they support ODF, because it means my own open source project only needs to support ODT documents as an export format, and it works nearly everywhere.
@veronica I'd say they are now no worse than their peers!
@webmink Tangled webs!
ODF vs OOXML is not the only example.
In 1998, following the submission of VML and PGML (both vector graphics formats using XML) to W3C, a new standards working group was created, SVG, to take the best of both for the Web. Microsoft decided not to join largely because SVG used so much PGML & promoted VML in its products, implementing it in Internet Explorer and Office so SVG would suffocate and die.
24 years later, Microsoft has deprecated VML and fully implemented SVG.
#BlueSky #ActivityPub