[OSGeo-Standards] Does OSGeo really "understand" OGC?

[Howard Butler]

> On Jan 16, 2025, at 4:15 AM, Joana Simoes via Standards <standards at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
> 
> Maybe we could introduce a session to discuss this at the next member meeting? What do you think?

Joana,

The model of how OSGeo members participate in OGC is broken in a few significant ways. The most important one is OSGeo SWG members do not have voting rights, and the next one is OSGeo does not have a TC vote.

What this means from a practical standpoint is OSGeo-sponsored participants in SWGs can be ignored when there is disagreement. OGC voting is the same as the principle of nuclear deterrence. The threat that one *could* vote against you is incentive to work together to find common ground. When there's no threat from a non-voting participant, there's little incentive to actually work together when there is significant disagreement. While there are hardly any -1's in typical OSGeo project steering committee votes, the threat of a veto keeps everyone participating in good faith. OGC participation of OSGeo-sponsored SWG members does not have this dynamic.

OSGeo itself not having a TC vote means OSGeo-sponsored participants have no higher authority to appeal to either. In the end, OSGeo-sponsored participants can exist to provide momentum, ideas, and work for the committees, but if there is any kind of impasse, deference is always made in the direction of the voting-member commercial or government voices, not open source contributors. It is not just OSGeo's OGC participation that has this dynamic either – small commercial entities are effectively priced out of voting too. 

You could retort that voting does not matter and OGC is kumbaya, except for the fact that in recent years OGC has been taking technologies the open source community has pioneered and pushing them through its standardization processes. Many recent OGC initiatives have been to take our community's work after-the-fact – COG, PROJJSON, GeoJSON, GeoParquet (not quite yet) – and "standardize" them in ways the break our practical software compatibility, confuse the branding and marketplace we have built without OGC meddling to "improve" them, and functionally wrest control of their futures away from our communities that made them in the first place. With no pathway to voting, OSGeo-sponsored participants have little opportunity to control the direction of the things they have made once they go inside of OGC.

I think the open source community should be much more assertive in how it participates with OGC to protect its investments and implementation communities from be assumed/subsumed by this process. The first thing is specifications should be licensed in such a way that does not allow modifications (cc by-nd, etc), and that licensing should only be changed to allow specific standardization activities with the permission of all contributors. Second, OSGeo should support international trademark registration activities to protect the naming rights of these specifications (just like GeoPDF™️ :) ) to control how they are derived and marketed in the standardization bodies. Finally, OSGeo should financially support participation of its members to do standardization work in support of its communities – our community should be able to participate on equal par in person.

Howard

PS, sorry for the long essay, but it is a frustrating topic with a repeating pattern.