Joe wrote:
> It seems that the tide may be turning toward
> greater support of development of such vendor
> specifications, prior to their
> being submitted to an open standards consortium*.
>
>
> *such a submission is purely my own assumption, and is based on
> pure speculation.
>
You may want to get involved with the Web Services Workshops (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/community/workshops/). The
workshops are freely open to anyone.
Your assumption regarding submissions is correct. Microsoft
intends to submit completed specifications to a standards-setting
organization and is committed to license necessary technology on
a royalty-free basis.
