Warming up to open source

(continued from previous page)

directors to fill a seat vacated by Intel in November, credited the W3C's patent policy revision with OASIS' decision to revisit its own policy.

"The W3C made a very clear statement of principle that it wanted all standards to be RF, and that was really capturing a growing sentiment about what Web-based standards should be like," Glushko said. "OASIS tends to work higher up on the stack where you could argue that maybe there is some justification for standards that are not royalty-free."

Perhaps more important than the three newly designated patent modes is the new disclosure rule. Rules governing how contributors disclose patents potentially relevant to a standard under construction are of paramount importance to OASIS because the nonprofit corporation is made up of corporate, individual and academic members, Glushko said.

"We don't have an architecture board or a Tim Berners-Lee who says you do this. It's driven by the membership."

--Jim Hughes, chairman, OASIS board

"OASIS is trying to move in a direction to accommodate a more diverse constituency," Glushko said. "Things were particularly problematic about disclosure, and there's a lot of language trying to deal with having effective disclosure. What we have now is a pretty significant shift for OASIS."

OASIS maintains more than 60 committees working on various parts of 19 different standards having to do with Web services.

The Web services stack, as a whole, has come under withering criticism by developers including standards expert Tim Bray, who has called it "bloated, opaque and insanely complex."

Hughes said complexity was in the eyes of the beholder--and under the control of OASIS' members.

"Is the stack complex? Yes, obviously," Hughes acknowledged. "There are lots of bits and pieces to it both within and without OASIS. Does it take work to understand? Yes it does. But that's not too different from any emerging technology that's complex. We don't have an architecture board or a (W3C Director) Tim Berners-Lee who says you do this. It's driven by the membership. And we think this new policy helps these members address those concerns."

Perens urged fellow open-source advocates to take advantage of the new OASIS policy to exercise vigilance as new committees formed and chose their patent mode.

"I believe that open-source groups should watch working group formation at OASIS and should make strong statements in support of working groups' choosing the royalty-free option," Perens said. "Pretty much every OASIS standard would be one that open source can implement, and there's no good reason to shut us out."

Good solid open standards base

The industry needs a good solid base of open standards that are completely unencumbered. The competition should be centered around the quality of the implementations of those basic standards whether they are open source or proprietary.

[Bill Dautrive]

agree

Without open protocols everyone suffers. The world wide web would have gone nowhere if the attached protocols were proprietary and required royalties.

[katamari]

The best thing about standards...

...is that there's so many to choose from.