RE: [xml-dev] SGML complexity (was: RE: [xml-dev] Re: Recognizing...)

• From: "Len Bullard" <cbullard@xxxxxxxxxx>
• To: "'peter murray-rust'" <pm286@xxxxxxxxx>, <xml-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 05:52:06 -0500

That's pretty much what I remember too.  Even the MS products were free to
download.  That was one of the aspects of the SGML On The Web project.  It
kneecapped the overpriced software market.  As I said, XML Is A Good Thing.
It would be a bad thing if the urge to push more corner features into XML
reversed that.

len


From: peter murray-rust [mailto:pm286@...] 
 
At 04:43 31/08/2006, Len Bullard wrote:
>How many of the original XML parsers were open source?

IIRC most of them - at least that source code was freely available. 
The actual licence details may have been different. I can count Tim 
Bray's Lark, Norbert Mikola's tool (I forget its name, but it was 
seminal in developing XML) and expat and a Java equivalent from James 
Clark. Murato Makoto's tools. There was a good deal of stuff from IBM 
alphaworks - not sure how much of that was technically OS but it has 
inspired the development of apache.xml. I made a consistent appeal 
for OS on XML-DEV and I remember when (I think Fujitsu) made 
something available with a phrase like "We've listened!... and now we 
have released this under OS".

I can't think of many original XML parsers which were closed - 
certainly none which were costs-money. But memory may play tricks.

P. 

Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road,  Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069