Michka,
> I am mentioning that each person there works for a company which has its
> greatest interest in seeinf developed what they plan to sell. The fact that
> the UTC itself is filled with linguists and other such specialists is a very
> good thing for other scripts, but I suspect that many of them feel at times
> like they are speeding and hoping the cop does not see them?
As one of the linguists MichKa is mentioning, I'd say I feel more
like someone rushing to spend down the budget before the auditors
discover it was credited by mistake. ;-)
And yes, while the interests of the companies that participate
in the Unicode Consortium include their own bottom lines, obviously,
their financial participation in the Consortium is frankly
peanuts compared to the longterm payoff they are getting from
moving to a universal character encoding. Just look at what
moving to a Unicode-based internationalization infrastructure
has meant for Microsoft in its trajectory from Windows 3.X to
Windows XP, for example.
Also consider that there are other interests involved in
the Unicode Consortium besides commercial companies flogging
software. The research library community is such an example --
they have been involved from the start, and have had a member
on the Unicode Board of Directors from the start. And
increasingly, governments and other organizations have taken
an interest or even become full members. So the Unicode
Consortium speaks not only to and for a commercial bottom
line in software sales.
And even among the commercial software companies, there are
visionaries who "get it" about participation in the
establishment of the universal character encoding, and its
important for the 21st century information technology
infrastructure, and who thus don't stint when it comes to
the realization that universal also means academic, minority,
historic, and yes, even constructed script interests.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Mar 13 2002 - 14:51:42 EST