Also, we anticipated that ODF 1.2 would be finished by October, 2007. It would not make sense for us to be submitting ODF 1.1, and then submitting ODF 1.2 only 9 months later. That would have potentially resulted in two ODF versions being processed by JTC1 at the same time, while they were also processing the 6,000+ page OOXML. Would that have been a good idea? I don’t think so. Of course, we were wrong about the ODF 1.2 dates, but that was our thinking at the time.

Finally, JTC1 Directives allow the initial version of a PAS submission to be in the format of the submitting organization, OASIS in our case. But subsequent revisions must be in proper ISO format. ODF 1.1 was not in proper ISO format. We’re doing that work for ODF 1.2.

But in retrospect, if I had to do it over again, I would have done the ODF 1.1 items as ODF 1.0 errata. That would have made everyone happy.

Some comments from Alexander Brown on Andy Updegroves blog seem to indicate that he puts an aweful lot of importance to this when he reasons about the merits of ODF and OOXML as ISO standards.

I imagine that the review period can be longer so that if, e.g. a 6,000 page revision was submitted, the review period would be extended so that the review could be properly executed.

So if the original 1.2 revision was fairly small (relatively speaking), then adding more to it would make better use of the review/voting time than pushing those things back to 1.3.

Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.

Companies that participate in standardization, specifically of an open standard, typically have done the math and figure that they have more to gain from selling goods and services to a widely adopted technology than they would by selling the same to a much less adopted proprietary technology.

As for schedules, “release early and often” is applicable to drafts of standards. We should release drafts early and often, in order to get feedback. We just released a draft 7 of ODF 1.2.

But you will not see formal standards released at a fast pace. Consider: If I wrote the phrase “hello world” on a piece of paper and tried to get it approved as an ISO standard, it would take at least 4 months in OASIS (Public Review period, Committee Specification ballot plus OASIS Standard ballot). Then it would require an additional 9 months for it to be approved and published as an ISO/IEC standard (6 month PAS ballot plus publication). So we’re talking at least a year, even for something that has zero technical content and zero editing.

That’s why you will not see newly approved ODF standards every year. A more natural pace, considering the process overhead, is a new version every three years or so.

How come ODF 1.2 has been pushed back so far and the TC is now considering new things to add to it? I thought they were just finishing up the spreadsheet formulae before releasing 1.2.

Why not release 1.2 as originally planned and push everything else back to 1.3? How can you be sure that you won’t push it back again to get in “just one more feature” when the new 1.2 deadline approaches?

Release early, release often.

Applied to standards, “release often” probably means no more often than once per year. Certainly a standards body should be careful to spend as much time as necessary to get a set of features right. Pushing back release dates in order to ensure that would definitely be the correct thing to do.

But adding more features into a given release cycle? Why? What does that accomplish?

This is a very strange licensing agreement which is actually potentially damaging to participation by employees of companies interested in ODF.

So if you have the manuscript for the next Harry Potter, and you want to make money from selling books, then don’t post it to the mailing list. You’d do a lot better to go see someone like Scholastic Publishing .

We make gramaphone players here. We understand that other businesses think that phonograph records are where the value is, but we make gramaphone players. And it’s just as well if all the gramaphone players work to open standards, otherwise you’d never get your phonograph records to play on them.

Or the 21st-century equivalent.

When you sign up you’ll get an email like this:

—–

Thank you for offering to provide input to the
OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC.

Please take a moment to confirm your request to add

xxx.yyy.com

to the office-comment mailing list.

Confirmation is necessary to verify your email address, to assert your acceptance of the list’s submission terms, and to protect the list against spam.

By confirming your subscription request, you:

a) acknowledge that your postings to the list will be publicly archived;
b) agree to the terms of the OASIS Feedback License as printed below and located at:
http://www.oasis-open.org/who/ipr/feedback_license.pdf

——

So is it perfect? No. It is as secure as SMTP email is, which isn’t that great. But this is OASIS, not ISO. We don’t need to post guards at our doors when we have meetings. We just try to do good work carefully.

Seems strange, given that overline is a common text markup in several fields, but there you are.

I’m not sure how that keeps your IP particularly clean.