This is a great way of setting up a cartel, but not a good way to organize any kind of lasting cooperative industry effort. The political reality is that we're probably stuck with WS-I; but, at least to me, it stinks.
- Dennis
Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
flame>
This is a political issue between Microsoft and Sun. Just because senior
management at these companies act like little boys in a school yard, it
doesn't mean that WS-I is just some Microsoft puppet organization.
There are plenty of other serious Java players that have board seats at
WS-I. To wit: BEA, IBM, and Oracle. (also Fujitsu and HP) Microsoft only has
one seat on a board of 9 (soon to be 11).
I think it was a serious mistake on the part of WS-I not to invite Sun to be
on the board. It certainly has had a significant impact on the group's
credibility. But I can understand the reluctance of some of the players (not
just Microsoft) to invite them to play. Sun was very slow to get involved
with Web services. For a very long time Sun was trying to undermine the
entire SOAP/WSDL/UDDI infrastructure in favor of ebXML. (I know. I was at
Sun at the time fighting in favor of SOAP.) Sun was being less than
constructive in the standards efforts. Would you invite someone to be on
your board if you had doubts about their good intentions?
Almost all major web services contributions have been joint efforts by
Microsoft and IBM. Once the specs have been published, the two of them
invite others to join the work. I don't see a whole lot of Microsoft hoop
jumping going on. I see constructive joint effort. Sun is as welcome to join
the effort as anyone else. I was very pleased to see them join WS-I. They
certainly didn't win any points by standing in a corner and pouting because
they weren't picked first.
</flame>
Anne
