Re: Web Philosophy

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 03:02 PM 3/27/01 +0200, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> > The desire to participate must be accompanied by the willingness to write a
> > rather large check for the annual membership fee.
>
>Right: $50,000 for full membership, and $5,000 for affiliate
>membership, per year. Compared to membership in other standards
>organizations I'm familiar with (such as OMG or ITU-T), it is not that
>much.

As long as we're discussing finances, I'd like to point out that OASIS 
offers a $250 individual membership fee, something far more plausible to 
independent developers, and has far more default flexibility as far as 
confidentiality and process than does the W3C.

It's not OMG, ITU-T, or W3C, but there may be reasons to be grateful for that.

At 08:55 AM 3/27/01 -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>Kind of like somone saying "I want to start a working group
>to define the canonical use of milk". One person want to
>make cheese, the other, casein.

I think OASIS lets you split off and set up competing working groups to 
handle cases like this.  Both groups could then develop different specs, 
and publish them.  That goes against the very spirit of the word 
'canonical', but since both cheese and casein are useful...


Simon St.Laurent - Associate Editor, O'Reilly and Associates
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
XHTML: Migrating Toward XML
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books