Andreas,
I am sorry that you will not be continuing as a member of the TC. I am
sure the formula folks welcomed the presence of mathematicians.
I do disagree with the last point in your post:
Andreas J Guelzow wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>
>
<snip>
>I find the decision to be removed from the OpenFormula SC quite
>disturbing because of what it says about the the relationship of OASIS
>with those of us who are free software developers without being
>associated with commercial interests.
>
>
>
I have maintained my personal membership in OASIS even when I have been
employed by employers who had corporate memberships in OASIS.
Why? Well, because for an organization like OASIS that makes all of its
output freely available to anyone who wishes to read it (contrary to the
practice of some standards bodies) memberships are how OASIS sponsors
all of the TC activities, the websites associated with those TCs, the
Cover Pages (which have been *the* place for information on markup
languages for longer than I care to remember), ebXML.org, XML.org, as
well as maintaining liasions with other standards bodies.
None of that happens for free. Like all the rest of us the staff who
makes those things happen have bills to pay as well as paying for
offices, web servers, software and the like.
I have had and do have differences with OASIS over both procedural as
well as substantive issues but like members of any other healthy
community, we can disagree and yet still work together to have what I
consider to be an outstanding standards organization. True, there are
those "nasty" vendors but amazingly enough, I have close friends among
many if not all of them. We don't always agree since we have different
interests in particular issues. But anyone who has an ideological purity
test for associates is only going to need a very small room for meetings.
Considering the vast array of resources sponsored by OASIS and the
opportunity to work with people from the widest variety of interests on
technical projects, I think OASIS is one of the best membership bargains
available. True you get back what you put into it but that is true for
any organization.
I hope you will reconsider your decision to not continue as an OASIS member.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
--
Patrick Durusau
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005
Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work!
