[Xesam] [nepomuk-kde] An open-source project for desktop ontology maintenance

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On 8 мая 2009 16:35:06 Roberto Guido wrote:
> On Friday 08 May 2009 00:55:56 you wrote:
> > KDE, GNOME etc are too formal organizations
>
> "KDE, GNOME etc" are not committed to engage any open standardization
> effort across other projects.

Like FDO standards?

> > Does everyone include OSCAF members?
>
> Yes. And also non-members.
> If "be an OSCAF member" is mandatory, it literally doesn't means
> "everyone".
>
> > I'm not in a position to answer this with 100% certainity
>
> So, we don't know who is in talk with OSCAF, what they offer and what they
> want. It starts very well.

Your original question was different. Private discussions are umm private. 
What companies can offer? to whom? How can you ever know what a particular 
entity really wants short of resorting to mind reading?

> For the current OSCAF members: publishing organization chart of the current
> board and members list would be very appreciated. Or are those informations
> covered by industrial secret?

Very unlikely.

> > Getting FOSS desktops and enterprise setups to use the same spec is one
> > step short of world domination scenario ;)
>
> And rely those specs on specific vendors in one step short lack of
> adoption, so failure of any interoperability aims.

Actually it's much worse right now since not only the spec but even 
implementations now are "controlled" to a significant degree by specific 
vendors: Tracker(Nokia-sponsored) and KDE-Nepomuk(Mandriva).

The only recourse you have against eg Nokia doing nasty things is to explain 
the situation to a major stakeholder such as GNOME and offer a solution: a 
viable fork.

However Nokia is playing nice and we welcome them into our community.

> It is pretty obvious this discussion cannot produce anything, useless to
> continue. I would prefer to hear the OSCAF's board position at my questions
> in first hand, but probably I'm not "corporate" enough to gain attention by
> this organization.

The only thing that matters is: can both Free Desktop and OSCAF members 
succesfully develop a common standard that would fullfill their goals?

Would decision-making be based on merit and consensus or totally corrupted? 
Unf no officials claims, statements can guarantee this. There's no paper in 
the world that once signed would guarantee this. The only way to know is to 
try and see. And this applies to anyone OSCAF member or not. The only known 
(to me) defence against foul play is zero-effort forking.

Forking is as easy as git clone ( 
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/LICENSE.txt ). Public issue trackers 
are here to document decision-making and to explain the reasons for forking to 
the outsiders. Both have been already OK'd by OSCAF.

What risks are we exposed to?

ATM there's nothing obvious(to me) in the spec that would require you paying 
money in order to see it or implement it. The real risk is some f-tard 
patenting SPARQL or something, but it's not specific or related to OSCAF in 
any way.

-- Evgeny