Last week's discussions
about SAX and OASIS have exposed
varying perceptions of the role and nature of the
consortium.
Jon Bosak refuted
the claim that OASIS presented "closed
doors" to the
XML community:
"There are no closed doors in the OASIS
process. All OASIS TC
mailing lists are open to public view. The $250 membership
dues
entitle you to *write* to the lists; reading is free to
everyone,
and there are no confidentiality rules to prevent open
discussion
of what goes on in OASIS TCs in lists such as
xml-dev."
Bosak goes on to note that OASIS could actually give SAX
more
protection than it currently has:
"OASIS IPR works the same way as IETF IPR
and
really does protect collaborative intellectual property
development in the way that most people think 'public
domain' does
but actually doesn't."
Simon St.Laurent welcomed
Bosak's guarantees about open
doors, but
pointed out that the OASIS web site does not yet seem to
fully document the
activities of the consortium. He was not convinced that the
protection
OASIS could afford SAX and its users was not a double-edged
sword:
I think you've somehow decided that a committee of paying
members is a
democracy while a well-coordinated mailing list project is a
dictatorship.
Simultaneously, you've placed the interests of large
agencies and
corporations above the needs for smaller organizations for
small flexible
and low-cost standards that work today.
OASIS certainly seems to need to improve its relations
with the XML
developer community. A post from Don Park illustrated
the
dim perception
of OASIS held by some of the members of the XML-DEV
list.
Peter Murray-Rust did
not see things in quite such an
extreme
manner. He notes that XML-DEV has a great part to play
in
innovation and
"bottom-up" development of XML technologies. Murray-Rust
also made the point that
the fact OASIS now hosts the XML-DEV list did not compromise
the list in
any way.
The challenge facing the XML-DEV community, he said, is
migrating
from early adopters to cautious late adopters:
The challenge, therefore is how we support
the unfettered innovation on
XML-DEV, move the results to proof-of-concept,
early-adoption and then
migrate it by some means to a certifiable
protocol.
Bosak's contention is that OASIS provides a way to move
from
early-adopter status to stability and credibility with
larger, more
cautious, organizations. The consequences of non-adoption by
larger
organizations may well be vendor-dominance and a loss of
interoperability.