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

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On 2 июня 2009 18:51:41 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 

Most of which have already been refuted ;)

> (burocracy, fragmentation,
> limits introduced by istitutional layout, and risk of dependency by
> industrial players).
>
> 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.

It would be a very weak position for OSCAF to formally have absolutely no 
influence on the standard it tries to promote.

> 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,

Dialog is a two-way communication. What you're proposing is monolog ;)

> 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.

Such as? Unless they of course take git clone with them and bribe courts 
around the planet to ignore the fact that everything that the org works on is 
released under a BSD-like license?

> Technicians write the code, politics promote it. Separately.

The world is not black and white. Some people are both. Promoting technology 
among professionals is not as easy as slapping "+20% free!!111" label on the 
packaging.

> 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,

git clone. This applies to take over of just about any other open project.

> attack by patents trolls,

Thsi is a global threat. As soon as you find a good defense against this, I'm 
sure lots of big companies will be willing to pay you to find out.

> and... escape to Cayman islands :-P

Semantic desktop community is not a totalitarian cult. You can simply let 
everyone know you quit. No need to run away that far.

> - 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

You keep pretending that copyright holders of BSD-licensed IP have some unique 
abilities to control who does what with their stuff after it becomes de-facto 
public domain.

But there's a real threat you failed to mention: What's to stop any org from 
forking FDO-developed spec and applying EEE?

Let's see what we have ATM:

Open tickets/discussion? check

FOSS- and fork-friendly license? check

Read access for everybody write access includes FDO community? check

Consensus-based decision-making(ensured by git clone and license)? check

Our own space to work out platform-specific issues such as DBUS APIs also 
acting as a backup should we really be forced to fork nepomuk by 
circumstances? check

Extra people to work on the spec(believe or not Leo is a researcher as well as 
other guys at DFKI)? check

Extra people to promote our stuff to minimize MS OOXML-like scenario impact 
(and yes MS has been trying to develop WinFS for quite some time)? check

What are we missing:

[Fill in the blank]

-- Evgeny