[alicebot-archcomm] Long Term Fate of AIML

[Dr. Richard S. Wallace]

Jeez, perhaps I should have said, "Get this guy off THE board."  This is not
an ego thing.  We are trying to follow the law for nonprofit corporations.

Rich

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Fahey [askrom]" <askROM@graphpaper.com>
To: <alicebot-general@list.alicebot.org>
Cc: <alicebot-archcomm@alice.sunlitsurf.com>
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 4:24 PM
Subject: [alicebot-archcomm] Long Term Fate of AIML


> > Everyone from my psychiatrist to
> > journalists to the CEOs of software companies was telling me,
> > "get this guy off your Board."
>
>
> So now it's "your Board", huh? Is that what you've been telling people?
>
> I'm very sorry to have to write this email, but I fear that if I and
> others don't speak up now and begin to develop alternative ideas to
> AIML's current disastrous course, we will simply watch all we've worked
> for quickly spiral into nothingness.
>
> I'm greatly concerned that some members of the AIML Architecture
> Committee, and the AIML community in general, have unquestioningly lined
> up behind Richard in his latest haphazard and obviously unilateral
> plans. It's totally depressing to me. I have completely lost confidence
> in the ability of the Alicebot AI Foundation (and particularly in Dr.
> Wallace) to develop the AIML community or the AIML specification in a
> positive direction any more.
>
> I am firmly of the opinion that AIML is now destined to one of these two
> fates:
>
>   1) Richard, acting as a one-man foundation (but perhaps eventually
> with some poor souls to help him) will flail away at trying to get
> people to regain confidence in the now-floundering AIML spec. This will
> fail and AIML will freeze at it's current version 1.0. Developers of
> Programs D, E, P, etc, will no longer have any confidence in a stable
> AIML standard to develop towards. Current and future AIML bot authors
> will learn to live with the current August 2002 versions of the various
> AIML parsers. In fact, I think this is effectively where we are now: I
> can't imagine the wisdom of continuing to develop an AIML parser project
> (or any AIML project) at this point since it's become clear to us all
> that AIML is ultimately under the control of whatever entity Richard
> Wallace chooses to call his Board, even if it's just him.
>
>   2) One or more alternative AIML organizations will emerge, possibly
> some flavor of open-source but also possibly commercial. Such
> organizations won't have Richard Wallace to kick around, but instead
> will endeavor to agree on an AIML standard between them in much the same
> way corporations today work with each other to establish standards.
> Richard will do battle with this organization or coalition, claiming
> that he owns the acronym AIML and the concepts AIML reflects. I hope
> that Richard will not do this and will stand behind his original opinion
> that AIML was a gift to the world. Richard might even support this or
> these organizations (his support is certainly meaningful in a symbolic
> way), although after these past few weeks I doubt any of them would
> offer him any decision-making capability.
>
> It is in Richard's best interest for #2 to happen. It is better to be
> like Rasmus Lerdorf (inventor of PHP) who has allowed his role in the
> PHP project to become less and less central as others have come along to
> develop it further
> (http://safari.oreilly.com/main.asp?bookname=progphp&snode=11) than to
> be known as the guy who gave birth to, nurtured, and then destroyed a
> great idea.
>
> All I care about is the AIML spec. It's the core of what the foundation
> was supposed to evolve and support, and to me everything else was
> extraneous. I never understood why we needed to have a foundation in the
> first place, and quite frankly I think the alicebot.org site was doing
> too much: promoting AIML, promoting Richard Wallace, promoting ALICE,
> teaching AIML, providing AI news, being the home page for Program D
> development, etc, etc. IMHO, the alicebot.org site (or whatever
> non-Richard-Wallace-centric successor) should look something like this:
>
>     http://www.w3c.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html
>
> I only hope that the various alicebot.org mailing lists manage to
> survive long enough for somebody to set up a successor group for the
> community, because I strongly fear that Richard's current actions will
> lead to alicebot.org's total destruction.
>
> -Cf
>
> [christopher eli fahey]
> art: http://www.graphpaper.com
> sci: http://www.askrom.com
> biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
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