Re: Sun and independent developers

Part of the problem here is that Dave Winer picked a very generic name for a very specific technology. He invented one language for embedding remote procedure calls in XML and called it XML-RPC. Sun seems to be using "XML RPC" in a much more generic sense. 

It's the same problem the W3C XML Schema Language has. There are many XML schema languages. The W3C chose to call theirs XML Schemas, or even by the more generic name schemas, without any indication that theirs was hardly the only one. 

I suppose Sun could have titled the draft "RPC in XML" or "XML for RPC" or something like that, but name conflicts do seem inevitable here. I'm afraid the specific XML application "XML-RPC" described at http://www.xml-rpc.com/ does not have a reasonable claim to exclusive use of the three letters XML, the three letters RPC, or even combinations of those two three letter strings. 
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
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|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
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Received on Thursday, 6 September 2001 11:39:09 UTC