This message is from the T13 list server.
Most of you responding privately and publically are supporting my
position even though you claim to disagree with me. You are saying this
is nothing more than an agreement between T13, an organization that
operates in the public domain, and a secret society, an organization
that oeprates under secret rules and NDA. This agreement states what the
public organization is allowed to do and not do and restricts what T13
can discuss and publish. Over the last few years this has been clearly
seen in the way T13 handles, actually fails to handle, many issues - the
biggest probably being the unreliability of SATA - T13 is appraently not
allowed to discuss this issue - and anyone discussing this issue
apparently must do it under the NDA rules of the secret society.
Yes, many features found in the ATA/ATAPI-x standard were developed
outside of X3T9, X3T10 or T13. And that is not a big problem because
those things were then incorporated into an ATA-x or ATA/ATAPI-x
standard, and for most (all?), X3T9, X3T10 or T13 became the "keeper" of
the standards for these features and changes to these features were then
the responsibility of X3T9, X3T10 or T13.
SATA is different. T13 does not control the direction of SATA or even
have the ability to correct problems or make improvements. T13 can only
publish whst the SATA secret society allows. This is cleverly inforced
by the fact that many (most?) T13 members are also members of the SATA
secret society and the same individuals respresent a company at both
organizations. This creates a environment where at a T13 meeting
anything that the secret society has agreed should not be discussed in
public is not disccused in public.
SATA is different from other "private" standards organizations. For
example PCMCIA and CompactFlash are both private organizations that
require membership to have input to a standard/specification document.
But this is clearly stated and known by anyone involved with these
interfaces. T13 gives people the false impression that the ATA standards
process is "open". But it is not "open" - all new SATA features must
come from the secret society and can only be discussed or published by
T13 with the express approval of the secret society. Anyone that has
signed the secret society NDA is well aware of this, and as I have seen,
they make sure this is enforced at T13 meetings.
Given this, why not disband T13 and let the SATA secret socity assume
all control of the future SATA standards? In general this type of
standards/specification publishing scheme works well for PCMCIA,
CompactFlash, DVD (especially the DVD DRM/CSS stuff), etc. It should
work just as well for SATA. And it would remove the false impression
that SATA is an "open" standard.
So I repeat: disband T13.
Or... If this is unacceptable then I propose that ANSI/INICTS enforce
new rules for committees like T13. Those rules would require that when a
proposal is created by a secret sociey and then permission is given to a
public standards committee to discuss and publish the proposal, the
secret society must disclose the list of their membership, the minutes
of all meetings, the results of all votes including the the names of all
members that voted to approve or accept any part or the whole of the
proposal, and fully disclose all the patents and patent holder names
related to the proposal. Further the ANSI/INCITS committee can not be
restricted from making changes to the proposal. This allows the
private/secret development of new things. Then when this new thing is
given to an ANSI/INCITS committee it approximates an "open" process.
This is process that has been informally followed for many of the
features found in ATA-x and ATA/ATAPI-x. Why is it now so difficult for
SATA to operate in this manner now?
Today we have a good example of the "non-open" standards process: the
SATA NCQ feature. Nearly every SATA drive shipping today includes this
feature, yet T13 is not allow to disuss it and may never be allowed to
discuss it. This is wrong. Either T13 should become the undisputed
keeper of the NCQ standard or T13 should go away and let the SATA secret
socity be the undisputed keeper of the standard. You can see that today
most people that don't attend the T13 and secret society meetings think
that T13 has control of NCQ. This problem needs to be corrected and
prevented from repeating in the future.
Hale
--
++ Hale Landis ++ www.ata-atapi.com ++
