That is essentially what technology companies hear when asked to submit their original technologies to standards bodies or for open-source licenses.
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Recently, for instance, IBM and open-source luminaries called on Sun Microsystems to publicly release the source code underlying Java. Such a move would "open a whole world of opportunity for new applications and growth of the Java community," Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging technology, wrote in a letter to Sun.
"The choice is between control and ubiquity, and despite your claim that 'open source is our friend,' Sun appears to be choosing control," asserted Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative.
Both IBM and Raymond make very valid points. Java would begin to spread more widely if Sun loosened its control. Linux has gone from being a curiosity to a worldwide phenomenon
The pendulum seems to have swung too far in favor of standardization.
Sun has resisted the push, asserting that it does not want to see the proliferation of incompatible versions of Java.
But it also has a stronger--and unstated--counterargument. "Have you seen how many cell phones are out there that use Java?" it might go. "Do you realize we get about 25 cents for each one of those? And besides, do you think it was easy or cheap to get this ball rolling? The T-shirts and souvenir squishy balls alone cost us millions of dollars."
While standards and openness can clearly help the industry and consumers, and even rebound to the benefit of the inventors, the pendulum seems to have swung too far in favor of standardization. Any time a technology becomes popular, advocates for royalty-free licenses begin to demand committees and working groups. Inventors and those who would assert patent rights get painted as goons in the way of progress.
Standards, of course, have their place. When railroad tracks were first being laid in Europe in the 19th century, most industrialized nations agreed on a track gauge. Russia didn't. It built wider tracks to prevent a German invasion. Instead, the move prevented the czar's armies from getting to the front in a timely manner in World War I.
Similarly, the technology industry has proved adept at adopting standards as a way to eliminate potential incompatibilities in networking protocols or in the internal dimensions of a PC chassis.
Many of these standards agreements, however, were creatures of convenience, put together when the profit potential was low and the risk from competing technologies high.
Standardization mostly benefits large companies, not small ones.
Standards advocates also often paste over another major conflict--namely, that standardization mostly benefits large companies, not small ones. If a piece of software or a chip design gets opened up for public consumption, the winner will be the company that can sell it the cheapest. Those with big factories and development teams win.
That was the strategy behind the standardization of Bluetooth. Cell phone makers and carriers loved the technology, because it enables notebooks to wirelessly connect to the Internet via a cell phone. Inexpensive Bluetooth receivers built on standards would have paved the way for these companies to dominate wireless data traffic.
Had the plan worked, it's hard to imagine that Atheros Communications or other Wi-Fi specialists would have gotten far.
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By contrast, the only asset smaller companies often have is their intellectual property, which standards bodies by their nature press for them to give up. This point was brought out recently in the Federal Trade Commission's decision in favor of memory chip designer Rambus. The company was accused of fraudulently failing to disclose that it was working on a version of high-speed memory while a member of the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association in the 1990s.
In its 348-page decision, the court quoted a March 10, 1997, Mitsubishi memo: "To counter Intel's move toward adopting Rambus, eight companies have been meeting once every two weeks to quickly plan DDR (double data rate) specifications."
There you have it. Rambus may well have behaved in an underhanded way, as its critics contend. But the same goes for the behemoths. They collaborated within a standards organization with one concrete goal: to cut the small guy out.
Naturally, many will disagree with this. But before you send off an angry e-mail, take this simple test: Assume that you have just inherited a patent from the estate of your great-grandfather that would enable you to collect $1 for every phone ever installed on a network. Would you: a) Renounce the claims on the grounds that they could spur growth and opportunity, especially in developing nations; or b) Whoop it up with glee?
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
To start with: Java isn't a "Standard," unless you can name the independent third-party who publishes the document that is the definition of the standard. Java is a convention, a commercial product. Standards have force of law: If you buy film that claims to comply with the ISO standard for that film, and it is deficient, the documented standard is your reference that gives you an edge in court. If you claim some statement "should be valid" in Java, based on your read of the Sun dcouments, you have little leverage if Sun disagrees with you.
Secondly, standards benefit customers, whether large or small. If the various IM products (AOL, MSN, Yahoo) all complied with a common international standard, the IM users would benefit, but the various vendors don't want that: They want to control their own product and and populations of users, and don't want their competitors horning in on that lucrative (and captive) advertising market. Vendors, by and large, don't like standards, because it opens the market to competition.
Finally, whether Java's code is released to open source is a business decision. Even if Java were standardized, the actual implementation of the standard by Sun is the "reference version." A standard would allow other companies to engage in building the Java product, to the benefit of customers. It's unlikely that any of those software developers would like their product to become an "open source" effort, if they ever expect to make substantial profits.
Learn a lot more about standards before making such a hash of the topic as is represented by this piece.