Open Sauce Software

In two weeks, ISO is celebrating World Standards Day, along with IEC and ITU. That might make a good day to focus attention on efforts to improve its work in IT standards.

"World Standards Day is celebrated each year on 14 October to pay tribute to the efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who collaborate within IEC, ISO and ITU to develop voluntary International Standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological advances," says the ISO announcement.

The event is much broader than IT standards - this year, it is about sustainable buildings. But it might be a suitable day for helpful public statements from groups who agree with IBM that standards processes need some work.

It's a day when good standards work is celebrated, so it might also be a suitable day for ISO to respond to criticism in this area where it's widely felt to have fallen short....

IBM's attack on traditional standards makers will become really significant if other companies join in, either supporting IBM or producing their own policies.

It is still early days, though. Nothing happens quickly in IT standards work. It is still only a week since IBM dropped its bombshell, and that's not long enough even for an acknowledgement from ISO - the group has no public statement yet at all on this, that I can see.

There's been support from open source consortium The Linux Foundation, where executive director Jim Zemlin applauds and supports IBM's efforts towards "raising the bar in the standards develolpment proces".

That's a small step, but, as Andy Updegrove points out, "IBM is touching on a widely-felt sense of unhappiness with the status quo. And while the new IBM policy may be more articulate and cohesive than what others may be thinking to themselves, it is giving voice to the type of self-evident best practices that ought, by rights, to be already directing all standards development efforts everywhere. The problem is not that the IBM principles are, or should be, seen as controversial, but that they need to be publicly stated at all."

"IBM has started a ball rolling here that that others should put their shoulders behind," says Updegrove. "Hopefully there will be more such statements in the near future, and more voices added to the dialogue."

I don't have good network bandwidth today, so I'll just pass on another link: nearly ten years ago, it seems Sun regarded Ecma as "accommodating" for its standards publishing requirements.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CGN/is_1999_April_30/ai_54520024/pg_1

The standard maker Ecma has responded to the harsh criticism it's had from within IBM, among other places.

Essentially, people objecting to Ecma's fast track standard process are actually complaining about a particular standard, not the process that made it, says Istvan Sebestyen, secretary general of Ecma International.

The "PAS" process by which Ecma submits standards to ISO for fast-track approval has been working well since 1961, he says in an email. Given that, why is it suddenly broken in 2008?

Also, he says the process is continually up for review and improvement.

The obvious response to this will be that, if the result is bad, we must check the process out (and I believe there have been previous incidents where ECMA's been seriously criticised).

I won't add more - I'll just post his comments below, after I mention in passing that as far as I know, ISO has not yet made any public response to IBM's comments.

Over to Dr Sebestyen:

Two things:
Generally, on the rules and procedures in every standards body (Ecma, ISO, ITU,...) there is a constant refinement that is going on. So in that spirit lessons learned, changes, modifications on the ISO/IEC Fast Track and PAS process can of course also be expected sometimes in the future. The JTC 1 SWG on Directives has several proposals for such modifications on the table, also on the above subject and will discuss those and if needed make proposals to JTC 1 for changes. When that will exactly happen I do not know.

Second: I hear critics regarding Fast Track only vis-a-vis IS 29500, but not vis-a-vis the other Fast Tracks that have been and are being completed (Ecma had at least other 20 since the ECMA-376 Fast Track, though I have not counted them concretely one by one). So, my feeling is that the problem is with this standard rather than the entire Fast-Track process. If you go to our website, and look into the old Ecma yearbooks e.g. from 1962, so will find that even at that time this practice was followed. So, the generalization of the problem is not appropriate. So, suddenly what has worked since 1961 well, why does not work suddenly in 2008 any more? Now, as soon as you look into the approval of this particular OOXML standard you find that the problems are more political than technical. The technical comments (such as lenght of the standard) if you go into the depth of them are most also of political nature. E.g. that the standard is long... Well true, but 4000 pages are for computer consumption and not for human; "time for review too short", well SC34 got the first version for info and comments mid 2006, Ecma has published the drafts publicly on the web site etc....

Kind regards,
Dr. Istvan Sebestyen - Secretary General
Ecma International

IBM slating ISO's standards work? That is possibly the most ironic It event of the year - but I'm afraid you need some ancient history to appreciate it.

Thirty years ago, the boot was on the other foot. ISO blasted IBM's proprietary practices. IBM has moved on since then, but it looks like ISO has gone backwards.

In the 1970s, IBM built up a lucrative proprietary business around the SNA network protocols it used for its mainframe systems. ISO was at the head of an effort which proposed standards to break this monopoly.

In 1977, ISO published the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) seven layer network model - a fine expression of a basic principle behind open networks: write the protocols in layers.

Then it made a big mistake. It went ahead and wrote a set of "OSI standards" for communication protocols, which wasn't such a good idea. With the ISO imprimatur, these became government requirements, even before they were properly implemented. ISO wasn't a network engineer, and the protocols turned out to be unworkable.

They were never really used but, incredibly, it took more than ten years of heavy expensive promotion, before the OSI effort fell apart in 1996. As an entertainingly contentious Wikipedia article puts it, this "severely damaged the reputation and legitimacy of the organisations involved, especially ISO."

In the end, the old proprietary protocols died away. But they weren't replaced by ISO's creations. Instead, they were displaced by pragmatic implementations of truly open protocols, especially TCP/IP. OSI diehards couldn't accept other people's standards and tried bizarre rearguard actions against TCP/IP, but OSI was doomed.

IBM took the lesson well. It formally "adopted" OSI when Governments demanded it, but it learnt the deeper lesson and actually adopted TCP/IP, the stuff that worked.

ISO seemed to learn something. It learnt that standards come into standards bodies from outside. It learnt, more or less, to keep its head down. To my knowledge, TCP/IP has never been "ratified" by ISO. It just IS the international standard.

((Incidentally, around the same time, ISO adopted Posix, a programming interface for an operating system. It was developed elsewhere, based on working technology - Unix - and touted as the basis for an open standards environment which would be an alternative to the product from the would-be monopolist, Microsoft. Today, Linux, Unix and Mac systems comply with Posix, but it's not clear how often this is actually used).

Fast forward to OOXML. On one level, it's OSI all over again. Once more, ISO has published, and promoted for government use, a standard that - from many accounts - doesn't actually work very well. The ISO ballot resolution meeting, remember, didn't resolve all the issues, and Microsoft has admitted it will get the standardised version of ODF working sooner: Office 2007 will never support standardised OOXML.

But on another level, it's very different: ISO got this standard from the monopolist. It's as if, in the 1970s, ISO had standardised a broken version of IBM's SNA.

ISO clearly still doesn't get it. And this time round, IBM is trying to put it right.