Newsmaker: You call that a standard?

Robert Glushko has a problem with standards.

There is a clear demand from customers for products that work together based on widely used standards. But Glushko contends that the standards process is stacked to favor large tech companies, which can control and ultimately benefit most from specifications that are ratified as industry standards.

Glushko, an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley, speaks from experience. As co-founder of XML company Veo Systems, Glushko was involved in early efforts to create business-to-business e-commerce standards using XML, or Extensible Markup Language, in the late 1990s. His involvement in XML led to work with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), which was formed to promote XML-related specifications, and the United Nations' Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (CEFACT).

In 1999, the United Nations and OASIS joined forces to promote ebXML, which was designed to enable electronic business over the Internet, rather than over expensive proprietary networks. But as ebXML began to mature as a technical specification, another set of XML-based specifications collectively called Web services--which had the backing of IBM and Microsoft--came onto the scene. Today, Web services are more widely used than ebXML.

Glushko said his experience working on ebXML reflects how powerful interests can derail the work of well-established standards organizations. He also contends that the standards development in governmental organizations, such as the United Nations, is a very politicized process. High-minded goals, such as cheap global e-business standards, can easily be tarnished by money, power and access to powerful bureaucrats.

CNET News.com spoke to Glushko to get his views on the state of technology standards after revelations that Microsoft paid some travel expenses of U.N. technical committee members on a CEFACT mission--a move that critics claim gave the software giant unfair influence in pressing the case for Web services over ebXML standards within the United Nations.

Q: Why have so many standards emerged for electronic commerce?
A: One of the issues here is what a standard is. That is one of the most abused words in the language and people like you (in the media) do not help by calling things standard that are not standards. Very few things are really standard. Standards come out of standards organizations, and there are very few of those in the world.

There is ANSI (American National Standards Institute), there is ISO (International Organization for Standardization), the United Nations. Things like OASIS and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and WS-I (Web Services Interoperability Organization) are not standards organizations. They create specifications that occasionally have some amount of consensus. But it is the marketing term to call things standard these days.

So what's an actual standards organization?
Well, a standards organization is something that is chartered to be a standards body that has some standard procedures?To me, a standard, in the best case, is some kind of specification which is developed by consensus of all the serious players and for stakeholders of some domain. (Standards development) has some open process and (the standards) are freely available and implementable. And there are not very many bodies that meet that definition.

How did you get involved with the United Nations?
They were trying to figure out how to do this kind of XML EDI (electronic data interchange) stuff, and I recommended that they work with OASIS...We talked for several months and the ebXML initiative was kicked up by the end of 1999.

Very few things are really standard. Standards come out of standards organizations, and there are very few of those in the world.

Now looking back...the key issue for us was that this was something of an arranged marriage, kind of a cross-cultural arranged marriage...CEFACT wanted a way to make (EDI) relevant in the age of the Internet and Web...(and) to be able to bring the benefits of EDI and automated business to smaller businesses primarily in developing countries. That was part of the overall mandate of CEFACT.

The XML people were saying, "We are a bunch of vendors, smaller XML companies. And it will be great if we can have some more international clout--maybe working with the standards body will give us that." So we sort of saw in each other a kind of ideal partner for what we did have. Mainly, they did not have expertise, and we did not have credibility. So that let us work together...It was one of the most heady times in my career.

This is around the same time that other XML technologies, notably Web services specifications like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol, an XML-based communication protocol), were getting off the ground with Microsoft and IBM. What happened then?
We really tried to get every significant player involved. Microsoft, which is a member of OASIS, had not joined ebXML. And at that time, we did not know why. It turned out that they were doing SOAP and stuff in the background.

We did not know that at the time we started ebXML. But when they came out with SOAP, they said, "Well, we don?t want to join ebXML because you do not do SOAP." We said, "Look, we will make ebXML messaging compatible with SOAP; please join ebXML." We practically begged them.

We ended up making ebXML messaging compatible with SOAP, but they did not join anyway. So, it was clear that it was already starting to be some kind of unraveling of the big tent and the happy community.

So what is the net result right now? IBM and Microsoft have taken the lead on developing a lot of Web services standards beyond SOAP, including others for electronic business.
(Web services are) proprietary specifications, please.

Why do you call them proprietary specifications?
Because they are proprietary. Look at the IP (intellectual property) policies that are published on the WS-I. There are all sorts of licensing of IP. They're not royalty-free. There is a lot which is completely unclear from an IP (perspective), which means you cannot afford to implement if you're a vendor.

IBM and Microsoft have submitted to the W3C and OASIS for development many specifications that involve other companies. How is that exclusionary?
Look, the whole issue of openness is really a red herring. I can say that my process is completely open and anyone in the world can participate. But let's schedule my meetings every quarter and once in Tokyo and once in Berlin and once in Vienna and once in Vancouver and once in Washington. Effectively only the biggest players in the world can play. So, making it open, but making it infeasible to participate means it is, in effect, not open.

No one should be upset about the fact that people are trying to influence the direction of standard bodies--that is what people do.

In some sense, even if the IP policy of WS-I and ultimately the other bodies were completely open and royalty-free, this would still be a problem. By having a rival organization to the OASIS which is where (these XML e-commerce standards) started, you are raising the stakes for the participant because now (smaller) companies like mine would have to play in two places rather than one. And you quickly price the smaller player out of the standards game.

How do governmental standards bodies like the United Nations and CEFACT differ from WS-I, OASIS and W3C?
The U.N. is not really (made up) of vendors. In fact, CEFACT was for a long time hostile to the vendor participation. Countries are members of CEFACT. Delegations from various countries and governmental organizations join CEFACT to advance business standards for the world, and they (send) people as volunteer delegates from their countries.

Now think about what that means. That means clearly you are not really a volunteer delegate because someone has to pay your way to get to the meetings, right? So, occasionally it is a government body, but usually some employer would say: "I think it is worthwhile to have my employee on this standards body because maybe we can find some way to influence the process for our benefits." Everyone has a self-interest here.

So, people join these things and they are funded by companies?But the process is inherently a very slow and parliamentary and rigorous formal process. That's what gives it the credibility, because they really feel they could take the long time (necessary to reach consensus) and people are involved. But the problem is that (relying on) the participation of volunteer delegates from (different) countries does not fit the time constraints of technology companies very well. And so ultimately most companies quit that game and they go straightaway to the W3C or OASIS. That is sort of problem. CEFACT was becoming progressively irrelevant in the '90s as the Internet was happening because it did not move fast enough.

A New York Times article from February cited people who complained about Microsoft paying the travel expenses for U.N. technical committee members, which apparently gave it undue influence over the standards process. Is that common?
I think it is a brilliant idea to try to influence the direction of the one legitimate standards body out there. But the problem is (Microsoft) did it in a way that does not look good with the lights turned on. I mean, everyone tries to influence the process, everyone funds different people to participate in these activities--that is just how the game is played. Someone has to pay the salary for people who are delegates. It is just Microsoft apparently didn't try to do it in a way that is very transparent. And that is the problem.

No one should be upset about the fact that people are trying to influence the direction of standard bodies--that is what people do. It is just that the one legitimate standards body left now looks like it is being contaminated by things which do not look quite right.

What do you think that a body like the United Nations can do to cut down on this issue of influence?
An awful lot of people I worked with on ebXML on the U.N. side as well as the OASIS side were extremely hard-working people who were really committed to the vision of ebXML as the world's e-business standards.

But I think there were a couple of people who are professional standards bureaucrats, who take care of themselves more than they take care of the vision...people who would rather have little empires than advance the cause of world e-commerce and interoperable standards.

More Newsmakers

What is a STANDARD?

The challenge for any standard to stand the test in any socio-economic form is not new. Ours is a capitalistic society and why do we pretend that there will be a single standard. Ah! The POTs I guess was the last greatest triumph, but then the world woke up and vested interested are the driving force now. Surprise! The role of standard bodies should be to act as a neutral party to force a holistic thinking based on the success of new solutions yet preserving the socio-economic form of the society in which they prevail. I think we have made tremendous progress since coming out of the caves but lets live in the real world. ANSI, ISO are doing great work but they too are represented by reps from businesses-albeit big ones and they need to respond to their stakeholders. I went to school and learnt lots of new tools but each business venture has been tempered by the layer of vested pragmatism.

Don't lump W3C with OASIS and WS-I on IPR

I think that Martin Lamonica got more things right with this interview than any one I've ever done, but I do want to correct one thing that I don't think I said exactly the way he reports it here. I do think it is fair to say that neither OASIS, W3C, nor WS-I are standards organizations according to the definition I advanced here. But I don't think it is fair to lump the W3C in with WS-I on either openness or IP terms, and I'd hate for people to make that inference. The W3C worked very hard to put a royalty-free policy in place while OASIS and WS-I have aggressively resisted one.

I have a problem with standards.

I have a problem with standards. And it is temporal. As Mr. Glushko states, CEFACT was becoming progressively irrelevant in the '90s as the Internet was happening because it did not move fast enough.

Speed or the lack of it kills. Most needed standards no not arrive in time to stop the Diaspora of formats from being siloed into our working world.


I create digital imagery for a living for learned societies, research libraries and the corporate world. Our company has called out in the desert to librarians, archivists, curators and IT staffs to make some small base standard for writing imagery to disk.

By the time ANSI/ISO gets to dealing with all the individual parts of this puzzle there will be billions of billions of NON-Standard images in place and no one with enough capital or will to recreate or translate them.

If we could create standards prior to creating products, standards would be successful. I think of the CDROM as this kind of pre-creation standard that boomed the economy of the products that followed. POTS, as Ajit Kapoor, lauds as the last great standard come the old fashioned way by monopoly.

I am thinking of guerrilla specifications as an answer to true standards. Get enough little people together using a guerrilla specification and make the large tech companies work to catch up and service the need.

Ah, just a thought!

[wbenton]

Importance of Standards

Standards are not defacto wanna-be's... they're compatible workable solutions that take years to delpoy... to weeks to scam like so many draft version providers are currently trying to offer.

Yesteryear only had a few players. IBM, DEC, Xerox and they controlled the standards that were truely interoperable standards.

Since then too many players have come in and too many defacto (per-se) drafts have turned the standards arena topsy turvey upsidedown.

[George Cole]

topsy turvey

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_dust_bags.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_dust_bags.htm</a>

Standards versus standardization

Dr Gulshko is discussing the issues he sees with standardization, the process of creating a standard. I don't think he is castigating the concept of standards. But it is difficult to tell.

In any event, these issues have been discussed for a long time and are not newsworthy (although understandably annoying). Solutions to such issues would be more intersting. I offer one paper that may offer some direction(IMHO) towards a solution. Please see <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.csrstds.com/FACS.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.csrstds.com/FACS.htm</a> if interested.

Business standards are not the same as technical standards

A bit of history. CEFACT grew out of the UN trade facilitation
lobby in Europe in the '80s, to create the global EDI standard
EDIFACT. Being a business standard, EDIFACT, and
subsequently ebXML, were designed for users, not just vendors.
Ray Walker and the founding fathers chose the UN rather than
ISO, paradoxically, to save time, and to avoid dominance by
American vendors. It is sad that 15 years later, we are back in
an e-commerce Tower of Babel. I blame the vendors, not the
UN, as Glushko seems to do, for not backing a single standard
to satisfy both the users and the vendors.

[chash360]

Standards and Micro$soft, thats funny...

Being a metrologist, I know a lot about standards and thier importance. The standards process is long and difficult, but well worth the benefits. Everyone needs to see the importance of standards, but they are essentially against the interest of parties that wish to gain from proprietary IP over a 'standard'. Micro$oft is not known for adhereing to standards, they promptly deviate and mutate from standards making them their own, successfully displacing the original, with their monopoly on the market (this has happened several times with the HTML spec). Many of these deviations are directly responsible for the emergence of things like adware, spyware, popups and malicous e-mail virii. Many of these software companies depend upon changing their 'standard' every few years, to promote purchasing all new stuff. The function of software in general is very much like the function of a standard, it has no moving parts, it does not wear out, it should perform the same function the same way, each time you use it. There is one huge difference, a true standard is free to implement, free to use, free to distribute, their is no IP and no royalties. Imagine if the U.S. Dept of Commerce charged you a royalty on every ruler, on every measurement scale, free commerce would become nearly impossible. Imagine Micro$oft opening up its software to such freedom, where it is free for me to write an application that can create, read and write an MS Document as good as the original for free, why then would I spend money on an MS Office suite? This is a future reality that I have been talking about for years, the software industry does need to be standardized and commoditized, to promote free commerce. Software more than anything else is capable of this. I would not trust MS to actually be in favor of that, surely they will attempt to influence the 'standards' in some way that protects their profit margin. I will believe in true software standards, if and when they start at the begining, with a review and certification process of source code compilers, and compiled code released to the public, certified to be free of security holes and standards deviations by independant labs. When you have these components in place, you will have a way to actually implement software standards, until then, you are just blowing marketing smoke around, and those of us who have worked on real standards will make lots of jokes, and laugh at what you call a 'standard'.