IBM sits out Office document standards effort

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If only it worked like that

ECMA doesn't work like that.
For MS to get their 1900 page document to be accepted they
first have to submit it as a 'contribution'.
Most TC chairs won't accept a whole document like this as a
contribution - they tag it as source material.
Everyone on any Technical Committee has the right to submit
contributions.
Before a standard leaves ECMA there is usually a Protocol
Implementation Conformance Statement [PICS] that details when
an implementation of the standard conforms and when it only
partially conforms.
MS have no hope of getting a bunch of real techies who are not
MS employees to write a PICS which lets MS pass of a whole de-
facto standard as an ECMA standard.
The TC then has to accept the contribution before it can be
worked on.
ECMA are very good at ensuring that their standards are open
and workable - MS is going to have to give up most of its IPR in
the document before it can be contributed.
The ECMA process then looks to see what other work is being
done in the same field and official liaisons are established with
those groups.
Indeed most contributions to ECMA are part or all of a
proprietary design that a particular company would like to get
standardized. The real work goes into the consensus and
compromise needed to ensure that the other two stages of
voting are successful.
We were a small company working in Call Center statistics and
needed to bias the output from the major manufacture's
switches to favor our product. The whole process took years but
we were able to insert messages into data that made the
standard more complete and also have prior knowledge of the
development directions within the companies who participated
in the standardization work.
So long as their are a few companies who want MS to produce a
proper open standard participating in the TC then the only way
for MS to get a standard via ECMA is for them to compromise.
This is a huge opportunity for IBM, Sun et al to work on a truly
open standard - but will they participate - sadly IBM say no

Posted by: Roger Huffadine   Posted on: 12/22/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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