Simon Phipps

This article explores the paradox that sharing a common vocabulary can actually restrict the richness and nuances of a business paradigm. The Trend to Share Common Vocabularies One of the trends we find in the rapidly expanding world of XML is a desire to define unified vocabularies for expressing exchanged data. It seems obvious that the number of XML vocabularies used should be minimized, and, indeed, efforts to find agreement within various industries are laudable and to be encouraged. But these efforts may not always reduce the difficulty of exchanging information and might, paradoxically, limit the longevity of information by hiding complexities behind superficial agreements. The issue is meaning, not markup. Consider this illustration. At a summit of religious leade... (more)

How Will Companies Ever Make Money Off Open-Source?

Tim Bray and I hosted a discussion at JavaOne 2004 on the realities of open source development for subscribers to Sun's Inner Circle Newsletter - mainly CIO/CTO types from some of Sun's best customers, plus a few stragglers (an IBM employee or two for example). It was a small, select, friendly but alert audience, a pleasure to meet and an honor to present to. A guest asked a question that ... (more)

i-Technology Viewpoint: "The Network is the Computer and...Open Source is its Soul" Says Simon Phipps

"I'm convinced that the reform that's needed is a root-and-branch reform of the very concept of the patent," contends Simon Phipps (pictured) in his most recent Webmink blog posting (http://www.webmink.net/minkblog.htm). Today's software patents, he believes, breach the social contract on which the concept of a patent is based. SYS-CON reprints the blog entry in full here with the permis... (more)

It's About More Than Just the PlumbingThe Real Issues That Need to Be SolvedAre the Nontechnical Ones

I've described elsewhere the idea of "swarms" - spontaneously federating devices and software services connecting over networks. Some people are now describing this concept as "wireless Web services," extending the group of ideas now being called services-on-demand. As usual, the computer industry is keen to address the details of protocols and connections, but is leaving until later the ... (more)

A Snapshot of the Future

WBT is pleased to showcase some farseeing comments on the emerging new wireless Java world from our International Advisory Board member Simon Phipps, who filed the following article - wirelessly of course - from the MS Volendam (pictured here while berthed at Willemstad, Curacao), while happily sailing aboard as a keynote speaker on a so-called "Geek Cruise." We are fast moving to a world... (more)