Comments on: You call that a standard?

Robert Glushko, Berkeley professor who was involved in early XML proceedings, decries how powerful interests have distorted the standards process.

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 let?s 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

http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_dust_bags.htm

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 http://www.csrstds.com/FACS.htm 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'.