[OpenISO] Some thoughts on OpenISO.org

[Norbert Bollow]

This is essentially a test message to verify that the list works
before I announce it publicly.

Anyway, since I'm sending a message anyway, here are some thoughts
from a recent email to a friend:

Generally speaking, the only way in which the world has ever been
changed for the better is by small groups of dedicated people who
(mostly) didn't have much in terms of financial resources but who
went forward anyway.

I don't know how realistic it is to expect ISO/IEC JTC1 to really
change, but I'm sure that without pressure from competition, there's
not much chance of ISO/IEC JTC1's deeply-rooted problems getting
addressed in any serious way.  Ecma seems to have built up a very
significant capital of influence there.  In fact Ecma has so much
influence that the rules of both SNV (the Swiss national standards
organization) and of ISO/IEC in regard to patents get ignored in
favor of Ecma's much weaker rules.

If however ISO/IEC JTC1 doesn't manage to get their problems fixed,
and at least someone seriously tries to compete with them, in the
long run eventually a competitor will succeed.


But is it fair to blame the recent problems on ISO?  (After all,
the known case of corruption and committee stuffing happened in
national standardization organizations, not at ISO.)

Well, ISO is a cartel consisting of the so-called national standards
organizations.  Collectively, the various national organizations
which together form ISO did a *lot* wrong.

And I'm getting the impression that a miracle would be required
to prevent Microsoft from winning the ISO/IEC JTC1 re-vote after
the BRM.

Right now OpenISO.org seems to me to be the only promising long-term
strategy.

This remark is not intended to discourage other reasonable activities,
but I do not think that anything we could do is likely to have
long-term success unless something like OpenISO.org is part of the
strategy.


What about the question of fairness?  Is it even possible for a
standardization organization to be objective and fair?

While ultimately market success will always be influenced by a large
variety of factors, many of which cannot realistically be forced to
satisfy fairness properties, I do believe that it is possible for a
standardization organization like the proposed OpenISO.org to avoid
being unfair.

Where there are several proposals of workable strategies for solving
a given technical problem, all satisfying OpenISO.org's requirements
for standardization (which would include being free of patent
encumberance or any other kind of vendor lock-in properties as well as
the exitence of a reference implementation under a BSD or Apache-style
or LGPL free software licence), OpenISO.org would equally endorse all
of these approaches.


Can we realistically expect to be able to compete with ISO and the
national standardization organizations?  (Certainly they're now also
thinking about improving their rules and procedures.)

They have several huge structural problems resulting from their
membership structure and established fundamentally-broken decision-
making rules, problems which a competing start-up organization
won't be encumbered with.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                    http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG  http://SIUG.ch