GMPG Principles

The GMPG was founded on the following principles:

• Scientific

  Simplicity

  From a set of otherwise equivalent models, choose the simplest one. More commonly known as Occam's razor. Simple parts should never get too powerful.

  Interoperability

  Implementations of protocols should be encouraged to interoperate. Thus GMPG has chosen to use the (cc) nd license restriction for its protocols and formats to reduce mutability into non-interoperable forms.

• Social

  Human user centrism

  Humans (especially users) first, machines second. Technologies must be first designed for ease of use (including authoring) and human understanding, and only second for ease of development and machine understanding.

  Community contribution

  Contributing to the community has wide ranging positive effects. The Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share. Thus GMPG has chosen to share all finished protocols and formats with the (cc) Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 (by-nd) license. All finished examples and samples are shared with the more liberal (cc) Attribution 1.0 (by) license.

• Political

  Unanimity

  Similar to the W3C's principle of "consensus", the GMPG's designs/decisions are made by unanimity among the Founders.

  New Assembly

  The GMPG believes there are many opportunities to launch new efforts, and thus encourages others to do so as well. Feel free to use this set of principles as a starting point — it is licensed under the Creative Commons (by) License which of course allows for derivative works.

• Economic

  Profit and prosper

  Enable people to build and sell products, without obligating them to divulge their intellectual property. Thus GMPG does not include the (cc) nc license restriction on any of its efforts, nor does it contain any so-called "viral" provisions. May you profit and prosper.

Inspirations and sources

Here are a few of the inspirations and sources for many of these principles. Note that many of these sources contain many other principles, some of which were perhaps not important enough, and some of which could even be considered counter-principles. It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine which are which. In no particular order:

• Creative Commons
• Tim Berners-Lee:
  • Principles of Design
  • Human Readable Information
  • Evolvability
• Bert Bos: An essay on W3C's design principles
• F. Heylighen: Occam's Razor

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