[alicebot-archcomm] The High Cost of Standards

[Dr. Rich Wallace]

Although I can appreciate everyone's interest in developing the AIML
standard, it is worth pointing out that the AI Foundation is still small
compared with other standards organizations,and the AIML business is small
compared with other programming languages.  This I think is the main
factor holding back the development of our standard.

One standards process I am familiar with is Common Lisp. There have been a
number of attempts to establish a standardization process for Common Lisp
after it has been officially published as an ANSI standard, but none of
them have really taken off due to lack of funding.
The original ANSI standardization was very costly and very time consuming.
According to
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/15248a1b11c5a603 it took
nearly 10 years and at least $400K.

During that 10 years, there were numerous large and small companies (some
of which are no longer in business, or no longer in the Lisp business) who
had a stake in the Common Lisp standard.   After that 10 year period, the
Common Lisp standard has been pretty much frozen in place because no
companaies or governments have stepped forward to pay for the
organizational effort.

It is true that Common Lisp is a much bigger language than AIML, but our
group is not really operating at the same level of funding as an ANSI or a
W3C.