[Cosmo-dev] Cosmo and Scooby URLs

[John Townsend]

On Jun 16, 2006, at 1:34 PM, Brian Moseley wrote:

> On 6/16/06, Ted Leung <twl at osafoundation.org> wrote:
>
>> The majority of the discussion around this topic seems to assume that
>> interoperabiilty, especially based around standard protocols and
>> formats, is the foremost requirement for Cosmo,
>
> i'd rather state it as: while efficiencies with ecosystem usage are
> desirable, those efficiencies shouldn't cause us to make design
> choices which pollute our otherwise clean interoperability story,
> especially when there are completely reasonable alternatives.
>

I'd say is as: We are building a strong ecosystem between our  
projects that adds value for the user, while still maintaining a  
strong focus on interoperability with external clients.

In some ways, I would argue that our goals are to ensure that the  
ecosystem says open and doesn't close to the outside world. I don't  
think anyone would say that we're trying to close the ecosystem. In  
fact, I think its the opposite.

But, its good to have guardians in the watch towers like BCM that  
make sure that we stay true to that vision :-)

>> However, for beta, most of the client interoperation
>> that we need to do is not necessarily with CalDAV, it's with
>> iCalendar, vCard, and GData.
>
> i don't disagree with that.
>
>>  CalAtom is blogpostware, so
>> I don't see it as a serious contender..
>
> you misrepresent the nature of calatom. there is nothing inherently
> better about gdata or less applicable about calatom. in fact, calatom
> is very similar to what we've already implemented in cosmo, and gdata
> is farther away due to its use of xml extensions. time will tell which
> calendar-over-atom approach wins, but they're both important, and
> they're much more similar than they are different.

I think this is true from a technical perspective, but from a  
business perspective.. I think GData is more likely to win. With  
Google using GData has its means to export and import data from their  
various online services, it will gain acceptance and wide usage  
rather quickly (despite whatever shortcoming it may or may not have).

--> towns