Standardization by Corporation
Maybe i spoke to soon. This just came in from ISO, the resignation letter of the SC34WG1 Chairman who has completed his three year term.
There is a fascinating statement at the end of the Martin Bryan letter. "The disparity of rules for PAS, Fast-Track and ISO committee generated standards is fast making ISO a laughing stock in IT circles. The days of open standards development are fast disappearing. Instead we are getting “standardization by corporation”, something I have been fighting against for the 20 years I have served on ISO committees. I am glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible..."
When corporations join open standards or open source efforts, they arrive with substantial but most welcome financial and expert resources. They also bring marketshare and presence. And, they bring business objectives. They have a plan.
As long as the corporate plan is aligned with the open standards - open source community work, all is fine. In fact it's great. For sure though there will come a time when the corporate plan asserts it's direction, and there is possible conflict. At this point, the very same wealth of resources that were cause for celebration can become cause for disappointment and disaster.
One of the more troubling things i've noticed is that corporations treat everything as a corporate asset to be traded, bartered and dealt for shareholder advantage and value. This includes patents and interoperability issues which not surprisingly are wrapped into open standards and open source efforts. Rather than embrace the humanitarian – community of shared interest drivers of open standards and open source, corporations naturally plot to get maximum value out of the resources they commit.
A primary example of this is Sun's use of OpenOffice, ODF, and an anti trust settlement disaster that left them at the mercy of Microsoft.
Found myself blocked from commenting on that blog entry for some reason. Here's the comment I tried to post. @ctrambler "Between vendor-heavy or user-heavy, I choose vendor-heavy. It is after all, a office document format designed for office application. Linking with other systems is important, but it is not the ultimate aim." That statement bespeaks lack of familiarity with what an IT standard *IS.* But it is a lack of familiarity shared by all too many who work on IT standards. Standards are about uniformity, not variability. An international standard must by law specify [i] all characteristics [ii] of an identifiable product or group of products [iii] only in mandatory "must" or "must not" terms. WTDS 135 EC - Asbestos, (World Trade Organization Appellate Body; 12 March 2001; HTML version), para. 66-70, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds135_e.htm And IT standards in particular must "clearly and unambiguously specify all conformity requirements that are essential to achieve the interoperability." ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives, (5th Ed., v. 3.0, 5 April 2007) pg. 145, http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0856rev.pdf Absent such specifications, a standard is a standard in name only. A standard is intended to establish a market in standardized goods, creating economic efficiency and competition. This is perhaps most simply illustrated with weights and measures, where a pound of flour must weigh the same regardless which vendor sells the product. But we can also see it in the interoperability context, e.g., with standardized nuts, bolts, and wrenches. Absent sufficient specificity to enable and require interoperability, ODF and OOXML create technical barriers to trade rather than promoting competition. And the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade unambiguously requires that national standardization bodies "shall ensure that technical regulations [includes international standards] are not prepared, adopted or applied with a v
