RE: ISO intellectual property (was Standards)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title:

Not exactly.  It is up to the legal entity with whom they have the

contract to pursue a legal action if they don't live up to that

agreement.  In the case of standards like ISO 9000, there is a

body with representatives that come and inspect a company's

processes to provide a certification that they do indeed conform. 

Having that certification is a requirement to get some contracts.

If the subject here is still "protection", there isn't much protection

against IP being reused, and changed.  That is a different issue

from having conformance testing and authoritative certification.  This

is the point about the W3C being a standards  body:  what do

you require of the organizations you empower to represent you?
More specifically, what do you want them to do with the resources

(time, money, materiel) you provide to them?   There are limits and

within those limits there can be discussions of quality, yes, but

again, ask if the role of the W3C as "technology incubator" and as a

"source of standards and possibly conformance testing and

certification" are necessarily the same, or if it is better to have different

organizations carrying out these tasks?

Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com [mailto:Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

This touches on another big difference (as I understand it)
between "real" international standards and what the W3C does.
If BigBozoCo claims to implement an ISO standard (ISO 9000,
maybe), and it turns out that they are just kinda sorta
working within the "spirit" of ISO 9000 but don't ACTUALLY
have people waste their valuable time filling out those
boring documents, someone (ISO? a government? a disgruntled
customer?) is likely to take legal action against them.  But
if BigBozoCo's claims to implement the W3C XML Schema spec, and
it turns out that they didn't actually have the developers waste their
valuable time implementing all those boring
types or content models, nobody can do anything except whine about it.

Is this not true?