From the HOPE 2024 Livestream - TRACK 1 (MARILLAC) (8:45:06), bolds mine:
[8:45:06] We need to look for other mechanisms to check the quality of standards. And I really favorite a two part system for standardization, one of which is: we have a standard. It’s arrived at by industry. It’s overseen by NIST, or by the European Commission, or by a blue ribbon panel of experts, whatever.
[8:45:24] So we make a standard, and this is the standard and it is described, and then we have a safe harbor for people who reverse engineer to meet the purposes of the standard. So we say you can violate the DMCA copyright, patent, trademark, all the neighboring rights, and so on, provided that you do so to further the interests of the standard, and that you don’t violate labor privacy or consumer rights while you do so.
A couple of less relevant paragraphs
[8:45:49] And so now you have two different ways of interoperating with something. So you can either follow the standard for the EHR and just do the EHR, or you can hack the EHR and figure out how to export its data, or make a middleware layer or do whatever else it is you want to do. Now, no one who’s got a good standard is going to bother with all the reversing and sort of tedious stuff, right?
[8:46:09] Preferentially, we will start with the path that has been laid out for us. So on the one hand, this tells us if everyone who reimplements the standard or makes the interoperable product is reversing the dominant product, then you know that the standard sucks. Right? It’s like, it’s a good reason to go back to the drawing board. And on the other hand, it means that you will still have a solution even though the standard sucks.
[8:46:34] So I think that, like, this is like a two part epoxy, where you have something that’s quite rigid, right, and very strong, which is a defined standard, and you have something that’s quite gooey, which is reverse engineered solutions and scraping and bots and intermediary layers and whatever, that every time they change their backend, you’ve got to hastily rewrite your client so that it continues to work. And that when you put the two of them together, you get something that is strong and flexible.
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