[OSGeo-Discuss] Software Standards - The Ugly Truth

[Cameron Shorter]

Landon,
You have made some accusations about poor OGC standards and the 
financial barrier to joining the OGC.

1. I'm with you on the financial barrier to joining the OGC. In 
particular, I don't like OS developers being locked out of OGC's 
testbeds (which is where the OGC tries out proposed standards).
Consequently, standards are being built outside of the OGC and "tested 
in the wild" before they are adopted by the OGC. In particular, the 
GeoRSS standard was developed outside the OGC then adopted. There is 
currently work on a Tiled WMS spec and a GeoJSON spec which I expect the 
OGC will adopt soon. These specs are being built by Open Source developers.
To me, this shows limitations in the OGC's membership criteria which is 
locking out Open Source developers.

2. You make accusations that the standards don't work, and that you have 
something better. I'd like to hear examples of this before I'd be ready 
to agree with you.
What standards don't work?
What standards stifle innovation?
What standards to you need to do your work?

Dave Patton wrote:
> Blammo wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure what to do about the monetary aspects of the Standards 
>> participation.
>
> What is needed is the equivalent of an "angel investor":
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_investors
>
> By that what I mean is a corporate entity that will
> step forward and setup a model where money that would
> otherwise be spent on memberships in standards bodies, etc.,
> is put into a business model whereby the money funds
> things like infrastructure, grants to individuals or
> companies to provide resources to work on reference
> implementations of standards, legal fees to make sure
> that nobody can monopolize the results of the process,
> etc. Such corporate entities have to be forward thinking,
> and can gain competitive advantages in terms of good will,
> being involved with a wide spectrum of development and
> intellectual talent, and maybe even attracting some
> 'anti-establishment types' to work for 'their team' ;-)
>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254