[OpenID] why is xri so obtuse?

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Tue Jan 2 19:05:59 UTC 2007


Drummond Reed wrote:
 >>> 1) XRI is an open, public, royalty-free identifier
 >>> standard developed at OASIS. It is every bit as free
 >>> as the URI or IRI specifications from IETF
 >>> (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt and
 >>> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt).

James A. Donald wrote:
 > > Anyone, including Microsoft, can declare open public
 > > royalty-free standards for interfacing to their
 > > proprietary for profit services, and their
 > > proprietary for profit software, and with great
 > > regularity Microsoft does exactly that.

Drummond Reed wrote:
 > While I don't dispute that, James, it doesn't seem
 > fair to lump everyone in the world who publishes
 > royalty-free standards in with Microsoft. There are
 > hundreds of open standards that were created simply to
 > solve problems on the net and not accomplish
 > proprietary lock-in. RSS and microformats are just two
 > examples.

This open standard, if widely adopted, means that one
particular entity gets a monopoly over all names, and
can charge for them what the market will bear. It is an
open standard for interfacing to a proprietary for
profit service.

James A. Donald wrote:
 > > - but every XRI name space requires a single root,
 > > who thus has monopoly control of that namespace.

Drummond Reed
 > Is that not true of all namespaces?

A full implementation of Zooko's triangle is multi
rooted, and functions similarly to the way we handle
actual human names or words in the English language.
You don't have to apply to anyone for permission to use
a name, or pay a fee to someone for use of that name,
nor can that name be suddenly taken away from you after
you have developed a lot of customer loyalty towards
that name.



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