Getting involved with M





Anonymous said...

Have they addressed how they will license relevant patents? IIRC, that is the issue against Mono right now, and that also will be the issue against M if not addressed clearly and early.

Dirkjan Ochtman said...

Meh; as soon as I try to get on their site and view some presentation/video, I have to download Silverlight. Doesn't seem like openness/willing to participate to me.

James Clark said...

They have addressed the patent issue by undertaking that the finished M specification will be covered by their "Open Specification Promise".

Anonymous said...


You can download the videos without installing silverlight by clicking on the "Download Video" link to the right.


Anonymous said...

"M really ha[s] the potential in the long term to be an interesting and useful alternative to XML"

Why do we need one - what are the limitations of the XML family of standards that you hope M will address?

Unknown said...

> documents is a make or break issue
what kind of documents? XML? Or, documents like specs or whatever, you can parse them for whatever reason?
I'm looking at M et. al. to handle DSL-based documents such as specifications:
c.f. http://bengillis.wordpress.com/2009/04/18/a-variety-of-dsls-in-real-world-examples/

Ben Gillis said...


readability. there's a lot of markup in it that's not needed to get the point across w/ many XML documents. They're crowded with meta/markup.

DSLs have long been used to convey human-readable information w/o all the meta/markup. And, to present a schema or format that makes sense to the specific problem space (aka "domain" in "domain-specific languages) that XML doesn't handle well at all.

Unknown said...

hmmm. No reply. Dead post, James?

As for XML replacements, there were DSLs all over the place before XML was ever around. Most of the shops I know using them are still shaking their head, 'why was XML chosen, with all its markup and poor human readability? A DSL(s) could have been done just as well." Once it was mainstream, myself and others billed hours and hours digging it out of comms protocols, it jammed so many systems it was ridiculous. We added a new field to all of the DSLs in our suite, ACRONYM, for one reason: XML, keep the tags/labels short. XML should have never been used in many places it was, and DSLs were being used for cross systems talk very nicely.

Many say XML caught on for one reason: marketing. "Some new, great technology" that's led us backwards in some respects while the alternatives were there to do all XML could (as much as I can think of) + avoid the headaches XML has.

mdi said...


I think they might be receptive to the idea of open sourcing the SDK components of Oslo/M and keeping the higher level tools proprietary.

If enough of us make a point that this is worth doing, we could change their minds.


Anonymous said...

"M being an alternative to xml due to readability?".

If that's the concern, then why not have a tool that simply grabs any xml and makes it more readable?

Anyways, DSLs were around a long time. and you can express them in xml if you like. Anyway the whole point of this fruitless exercise is lost on me.