[Xesam] The Ontology Open Source Project and OSCAF - 2nd try

[Sebastian Trüg]

On Tuesday 02 June 2009 17:51:41 Roberto Guido wrote:
> On Friday 29 May 2009 14:20:07 Sebastian Trüg wrote:
> > we came up with a compromise
>
> I cannot see anything different from the previous proposal, so I have
> nothing to add to previously exposed critics (burocracy, fragmentation,
> limits introduced by istitutional layout, and risk of dependency by
> industrial players).

It is different as it includes changing the role of OSCAF or at least the 
presentation (the role was never supposed to be taking control of development 
or enforcing decisions).

> On the other hand, I can advance my own idea of "compromise": leave
> development of the specification in an independent community-based effort
> (freedesktop?), and involve OSCAF just as a propaganda organization.

Didn't I say that development should be 100% community driven? That all 
copyrights should stay with the contributors, that in fact it should become a 
pure open-source project?

> Since the only aim of that istitutional entity seems to be the dialog with
> enterprise-sized vendors it is not required it drives also development, and
> their members would decide whatever they want about the organization
> (require an higher membership fee, close the association, escape to Cayman
> islands...) with any side effect on effective development of the
> technology.
>
> Technicians write the code, politics promote it. Separately.
>
> This way:
> - development is granted against any istitutional accident, such as failure
> of the organization, take over by any industrial partner, change of
> membership policies, attack by patents trolls, and... escape to Cayman
> islands :-P - if any other entity (istitutional or not) wants to help in
> promotion and development, it is granted may do it without regards about a
> single organization internal decision but only accordly the whole community

Maybe I did not formulate it clearly enough, but this is pretty much what I 
have in mind. OSCAF would not have any other power than the power of its 
members. And by that I mean the members that are also contributors to the 
ontology project. We join OSCAF to promote to the world that we unite to 
create an open standard for desktop ontologies. Sure, it could all be done 
without OSCAF, but why not take what's already there? We (and by we I mean 
OSACF, I mean the developers, I mean us all, because in the end there is only 
us, developing the "normal" way and promoting through something "official" as 
OSCAF) only benefit from an official portal to the outside (corporate) world. 
It gives a stronger image.
Imagine in a few months or years from now when our ontologies are rock solid. 
If at that point a big player will be interested in desktop ontologies having 
an frontend such as OSCAF will be a strong argument to use our ontologies 
instead of creating their own (maybe even closed) ones.

Cheers,
Sebastian