From: Adam C. Engst (ace@xns.org)
Date: Tue Sep 26 2000 - 11:59:27 PDT
At 10:36 AM -0700 9/26/00, Dave Winer wrote:
>My two cents: I know Adam for many years, and trust him. Dave
Thanks, Dave! I realize we're having a hard time conveying this fact
to an audience skeptical of Internet startup snake oil, but we really
are trying to set up XNS and XNSORG "right."
Point 1: XNSORG is independent. I and the others on the board, along
with our lawyer, fought hard against everything in our legal
documents that could even be perceived as tying us to OneName.
Obviously, early on it's going to be an uphill battle to convince
people of that independence, but it should get easier as other public
agencies come up and XNSORG is seen in the context of overseeing an
entire system made up of many agencies and helping to protect the
rights of many XNS users.
Point 2: XNSORG will represent and be composed from the XNS
community. Before launch, there was no XNS community, so we were
guessing on a lot of stuff. We tried our hardest to look into the
future, and we were very careful in places not to commit ourselves to
specific courses of action. Why? Because we need the XNS community
itself to give us direction. Some specifics here:
* We anticipate having a significantly different governance
structure within a year. We're talking with people at the Center for
Democracy and Technology about this stuff, and we've watched the
approaches taken by other similar bodies, like ICANN to learn from
their successes and mistakes. Ultimately, the XNSORG board of
directors must represent the entire community better than it does now.
* The XNS Global Terms, which contains things like the common
registration terms everyone must agree to, is a mutable document. We
released 1.0 on Sunday after 15 straight hours of editing and legal
nitpicking, and it nearly killed me. I anticipate one of our first
working groups will be looking at that document in depth and
suggesting changes.
* We punted on the open source license entirely because (a) the
code is still being prepped for open source release, so there's
nothing available day 1 anyway and (b) we really didn't want to do
something that the open source community would hate. So again, one of
our first working groups will be aimed at establishing that license,
and I'm totally open to using existing open source licenses if the
proponents of that strategy can make a convincing argument for that
approach meeting the slightly unusual needs of XNS.
So I'm more than happy to take input (particularly on the XNS lists,
where everyone who's interested can respond and help move the
platform and XNSORG forward), and I'll strongly defend our
independence and openness. In fact, although we haven't had time to
set up the mechanics of our dispute resolution process, I've already
personally committed to resolving with OneName the complaint of
someone who had trouble registering a business agent due to the
massive server load that caused problems yesterday.
cheers... -Adam
______________________________________________________________________
Adam C. Engst, XNSORG President XNS Name: =Adam Engst
Email: <ace@xns.org> Web: <http://www.xns.org/>
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