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Comment by johnvschmitt | Hacker News Reader

They didn't launch any protocol. They launched a site to get (paying) members to come up with a protocol. Big difference.

I'm not too hopeful yet. Maybe it's just their ".aspx" website that has a proprietary flavor to it, when we terribly need an open standard here.

We do need an open standard, so each inventor just needs to implement their idea, & not spend 90% of their time building the whole supporting architecture, and trying to train the customers in the differences in the setup. The wearables/IoT ecosystem will continue to flounder until the equivalent of W3C arises.

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The wearables/IoT ecosystem will continue to flounder until the equivalent of W3C arises.

The horse may have left the barn already. We have the IETF, and they have offered CoAP. (http://www.utwente.nl/ewi/dacs/Colloquium/archive/2010/collo...)

But the gold rush to claim a chunk of the IoT and wearables product space means a good many people and groups want to invent Yet Another Standard.

With so many out there (some good, some wonky) it wil be hard for any single organization to stand up and declare anything remotely like a de jure standard.

(For myself I'm working on software to at least bridge some of the more sensible ones.)

Err, saying that a site has a proprietary flavor just because it's hosted on Windows, is like saying this open standard is proprietary since the documentation was authored in MS Word.

>is like saying this open standard is proprietary since the documentation was authored in MS Word.

And yes, that gives off the same vibe. It's a vibe that says, "we're not really into open source". I say that in spite of Microsoft's recent -- and welcome -- forays into open source. Their technology is still used primarily among people and organizations who are not very welcoming to open source technology.

Indeed, it's like a recruiter asking me to email them my resume in Word format ... for a role working with an almost entirely Free Software stack. Clueless on so many levels, and a great big warning sign.

I just can't agree with this, I'm afraid.

Even though I'm a web developer who _loves_ open source on the server side and has pushed for as many open source technologies as possible in my daily work as a web developer, I much prefer the experience of MS's office suite to many of the open source alternatives.

And that doesn't undermine any of the work I do as a programmer. My job is to pick the superior option and weigh pros and cons for a given set of circumstances, whether it's open source or closed source.

I'm happy being a user and advocate of open source technologies without having to be an absolutist who won't use anything else.

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