Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 18 2008 @ 07:14 AM EST

You should probably take a look at the amount of cash that is hurtling around the 'Information Technology' industry, and the cases ... particularly in US courtrooms ... where US judges have directed corporations (and individuals) to do things or make payments which are not in accordance with their business plans.

The courts are the 'courts of equity' ... namely, copyright, patent, and anti-trust. Family courts are also courts of equity, but I don't think they have a significant role here.

The decisions .,.. or the threatened decisions ... of such courts are tending to destroy the prospects for scientific progress in the Western world. For example, if a scientist (or his employer who might be a globally-integrated hardware/software/services corporation) has to be concerned about the possibility that a judge might interfere in the corporation's business affairs as a consequence of the scientist publishing his work, the corporation won't let the scientist publish. Well, the work can be published on the corporate Intranet, but not on the external Internet. Management permission is not forthcoming unless and until there is a compelling commercial reason to take the risk.

NASA are trying to commission a space exploration video game http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7195718.stm . Do you think the proposed contract will require the work product to be open-sourced ? (Hint. The Space Act which set up the framework for the US taxpayer to fund NASA in 1956 or so gives NASA an objective to deliver education. NASA isn't in the business of selling video games. NASA open-sources all of its software that it can, as a matter of policy).

What will happen as between Electronic Arts, or Ensemble Studios, or someone that is in the business of selling video games, and NASA, as and when NASA's scientific progress threatens the commercial profitability of the businesses ? Will a US judge order NASA to stop distributing ? Or not ?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, January 18 2008 @ 08:24 AM EST

Some of the links to the actual articles are broken.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, January 21 2008 @ 12:59 AM EST

Your article " THE OVERWHELMING OF ISO/IEC JTC1" is pretty misleading in the section

<blockquote>While the proposed dispositions have been released in batches beginning in December, someone just commencing the chore of wading through them on January 14th would need to understand, evaluate and form an opinion on over a hundred comments, and more than half that many pages, every day of the week between now and February 25th. Given that each comment disposition previously released was packaged in its own, separate PDF file, and posted to a Web site in batches of 500 or more at a time, that is presumably what many delegates will in fact need to do.</blockquote>

For a start, most comments are duplicates. There are only 750 to about 1000 unique comments, depending on how you count them.

Second, more than 80% of comments have been agreed to by the editor. These range from typos to factoring out VML. Most of them just can be reviewed by scanning, when they are not your baby.

Third, a reviewer for a national body will be primarily interested in the comments from that body. In most cases, the NBs comments are much less than 100 comments.

Fourth, within each National Body, different members of the committees (and delegations) have different interests and strengths, so of course there is a division of labour.  There will be touchstone issues for each reviewer that they will often check thoroughly, and flip through the responses to issues that don't interest them or which are out of their expertise. There will also be some die-hard reviewers who will want to read all the responses, but they would not be the majority, for a large standard.

Where did you get the idea that every person needs to understand every part of every response? That is not the way things work in large standards, it is committee work.  Why don't you join an international standards committee, so you can enhance your excellent prose with experience? I am sure everyone would benefit.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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Authored by: Andy Updegrove on Monday, January 21 2008 @ 05:46 AM EST

Rick,

Where did you get the idea that every person needs to understand every part of every response? That is not the way things work in large standards, it is committee work.  Why don't you join an international standards committee, so you can enhance your excellent prose with experience? I am sure everyone would benefit.

Where did you get the idea that this was an ordinary standards process?  Of course, it isn't, for a number of reasons that I'll click through below.  First and foremost is the issue of trust, and past practice to date, not to mention the degree of disingenuity (to perhaps coin a word) that can go into proposing a single "disposition." And because the BRM addresses only technical issues,  there are the end game moves that have to be calculated (e.g., will Microsoft actually implement this disposition?  What's the effect of deprecating this feature?  What happens if there's an extension here?) that can make an individual disposition very complex to consider, instead of simply taking its good intentions on faith.

Most comments are duplicates:  Yes, but I am simply giving Ecma the benefit of their own PR, talking about how many comments that they have addressed.  Then, of course, there is the trust issue noted  Sad to say, I think that after the extremely poor job that Ecma did preparing OOXML for ISO review, improvement in their quality control process remains to be proven.  And then, to be fair, it is a large job, and mistakes might be made.  And even after excluding duplicates, it's still a huge job - as you would know from your own experience, where a tiny fraction of this number of changes would be involved, and likely with more time to review them. 

Not your baby:  Sorry, but I'm not buying that one this time around, either.  With a 6,000 page specification to review, many NBs are going to be interested in - and agree with - what other people spotted that they didn't.   Most comments are not country-specific, and therefore while they might originate in one NB, most will  not reflect anything unique to that NB's national interest.  And then, as you also know, there's the question of collateral damage - you have to be sure that the proposed disposition doesn't have an effect that you don't like.  As a result, I think that it would be the exception rather than the rule that an NB would have no interest in any of the objections of any other NB - in many cases, I expect that they will have an active interest in one to a few of the comments of most other NBs that offered them.

Division of labor:  Indeed, yes, there would be division of labor - in countries with large enough pools of available, interested experts willing to take on the task.  And there are also delegations of one, eh?  How is that one person supposed to participate fully in the BRM if s/he doesn't understand, at least to some level, all of the comments that are likely to be of interest?  And also, how many knowledgeable format experts do you suppose smaller countries have?   What is true for the US or France would not necessarily be true for a small country.  I expect that there might not be even one format expert in, oh,  let's say Cote d'Ivoire, Jamaica, Lebanon, Trinidad and Tobago...you get the idea - but perhaps that's another question of interest.

After representing over 85 standards organizations for over 20 years and advising clients on game playing in committees throughout all that time, sitting in on committee meetings, writing and reviewing process and IPR policies, advising on litigation arising from process abuse, writing amicus briefs supported by as many as 13 consortia and SDOs at a time with the Circuit Court, FTC and Supreme court, giving testimony to the FTC and DOJ, and much more, I think that I have a pretty good handle on how the games are played in the trenches, thanks.  All in all, I expect I may have a much greater familiarity with those games than someone who has spent most of  their time participating in the plain vanilla variety of non-controversial standard setting.

  -  Andy

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