[x3d-public] Setting up GitHub mirror of SourceForge SVN repository

Fri Oct 26 11:22:52 PDT 2018

Good thoughts Michalis.  Some things we can someday do, but some potentially fatal problems are really important to avoid.  A few more pieces of this big mosaic:

Many participants in the original VRML 94-97 community worked and joined together in 1998 to form the non-profit Web3D Consortium in order to the *protect the specification for the long term*, successfully creating a partnership among companies, agencies, education institutions.  The membership agreement allows members to bring in new technologies to improve our specifications as long as they _declare in advance that acceptance_ with the open standard is Royalty Free (RF) for any purpose.

This “safe haven” has worked.  Companies can offer patented work for consideration without fear of losing intellectual property rights (IPR) prematurely.  Our specifications continue to steadily evolve and remain RF with over two decades of careful due diligence.  Literally a “win win win win win win” scenario for companies, agencies, universities, individual practitioners, partnered liaison organizations and (not least) the general public.

Of note is that World WIde Web Consortium (W3C) eventually changed their two-track process to a single RF-only track, much like Web3D.  International Standards Organization (ISO) has also improved procedures in that such clarity is much more highly encouraged than ever before.

This all might sound wonky... so here is perhaps the best-known example of how file specifications can go badly sideways and threatened by commercial interests.  The GIF image format widely used and instrumental in early Web bootstrapping, then threatened with royalties.  Major multi-year uproar ensued:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement

It is valuable for each of consider how so very many many “VR” technologies have come and gone over the years, often sinking from most-popular to oblivion without a trace.  The Web3D international standards for X3D and HAnim continue ratchet forward and progress.  I don’t think that is accidental.

There’s more along this avenue (of course) but the point remains that we are not unwittingly accepting potentially patented technology.  Web3D members (you and I included) have committed to act professionally within carefully crafted rules, for shared advantage by, uh well, everyone.  Membership indeed has value - pretty cool!

Let me dream about the future too please Michalis - I hope that

- more and more people use X3D to publish and share their 3D models;
- we continue to show that 3D visualization, interaction, printing, scanning and metadata can coexist effectively;
- we together “finish” our active implementations of X3D 3.3 compatibly and completely;
- we keep building X3D capabilities upwards and outwards on our solid foundation for HTML5/DOM (X3D v4) and VR/AR/MAR/XR (X3D v4.1);
- archival X3D adoption for medical and heritage uses saves human lives and human knowledge.

Thanks for your many contributions to all of these things Michalis.  The subject work on github access may well accelerate each with more and more practitioners... we’ll see.

Onward we carefully and relentlessly go!  Having fun with X3D.  😀

v/r Don

Sent from my handheld device

On Oct 25, 2018, at 9:49 PM, Michalis Kamburelis <michalis.kambi at gmail.com<mailto:michalis.kambi at gmail.com>> wrote:

Brutzman, Donald (Don) (CIV) <brutzman at nps.edu<mailto:brutzman at nps.edu>> wrote:

As before am thinking there may be 3 kinds/classes of projects to maintain and evolve:

A. Controlled (such as draft spec) for private access and work by Web3D members;
B. Curated (such as Schemas, DTDs, etc.) with public exposure, X3D Working Group review and approval;
C. Community (such as X3D Examples Archives, maybe X3D Tooltips) that provided validated/verified public assets for X3D use & adoption.

BTW, in my dreams, in the future, this could change, to be a bit more open.

I don't want to entangle this discussion in this thread, as it is
unrelated to the current task (GitHub repo mirroring
https://sourceforge.net/projects/x3d/ ). But It's something I will
mention at some point in 2019 :) And in the meantime, you can find the
information on my wiki page (
https://github.com/michaliskambi/x3d-tests/wiki/Allow-to-propose-the-specification-improvements-publicly%2C-using-something-like-GitHub-pull-requests
).

Regards,
Michalis
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