Re: [minutes] CT Call 6 january 2009

Andrea Trasatti wrote:
>
> Aren't you biased now that you run WURFL Pro full time and the 
> user-agent is the key to your device detection product?
>
I run WURFL-Pro, but 100% of my income comes from consulting, not from 
WURFL, which is an open-source project everyone can download and use 
freely. So, if I am mad at what Novarra is doing, it is because of 
idealistic reasons, not because of money. In fact, if I wanted, I could 
go as far as arguing that Novarra is a good thing for me: after all, by 
making the mobile web more fragmented, companies who want to establish a 
mobile presence won't be able to rely on late-comers. They will need to 
hire professionals who know how to overcome the obstacles of an 
horrendously fragmented platform.

Unfortunately for Novarra (and fortunately for the rest of the 
ecosystem) I don't see things that way. I believe in fairness and 
justice. I believe that the web happened because the rules were clear: 
when you create a site, you know what people everywhere in the world are 
going to get.
Novarra breaks this. No matter how much testing you do, operators and 
novarra can come and break this golden rule. This will keep companies 
from recognising mobile as a viable new channel and they will refrain 
from investing in it. This is not very dissimilar from companies which 
decide not to open a business in a given country  because they know it's 
very corrupted there and laws are not enforced. If you get away with 
stealing and there is no sanction for wrong-doing, then investing is not 
a good idea. I still can't understand how you guys can't see this, and 
keep talking about this or that header, as if this or that header could 
be the remedy to a fundamentally flawed business model: making money by 
manipulating content one has not right to.

Once more, my recommendation is: let Novarra do whatever they want, but 
do not allow them to do it in W3C's name.

Luca

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 00:07:50 UTC