In message <[email protected]>, "Finklema n, Dave" writes:
>ISO has great influence, [...] Objectively, the biggest difference between ISO and ITU is that the latter is an UN sub-organization, and consists of governments, whereas ISO is non-governmental consisting of national organizations which typically are not subject to constitutional guarantees, political oversight or even judicial review. It is not clear if that means ITU can never sell a standard the way ISO did with OOXML[1], but all else being equal, it would amount to actionable corruption, should governments sell out, the way a lot of ISOs member national standardization bodies did with OOXML, in full accordance with their rules and lack of ethical guidelines. When subterfuge is used against ITU, the usual result is usually no standard, but a footnote that the topic is "for further study", see for instance how they went about 56 kbit/s dial-up modems. Both of ITU and ISO, as has been mentioned, were on the wrong side of the fence with the OSI protocols. Once the stance became ridiculous, OSI did the most hilarious about-face, ratified TCP/IP and claimed that as a success for the OSI protocols. That one caused a lot of mirht at IETF. I don't belive ITU has tried to rewrite history the same way, but I may be wrong. Aside from that, I don't think either of them can credibly claim to have a better hit-rate than the other, they're equally shitty at writing usable standards, and both could learn a LOT from the late Jon Postel in that respect. Unfortunately, the ISO/ITU mindset seems to have increasingly infected IETF, as anybody who reads RFC's can see. I also seriously doubt that Dave will be able to drag leap seconds from ITU to ISO, and can se absolutely no good or convincing reason to do so. Dave says that he "wants to use his influence in ISO", and that seems to me to be an execellent argument against. But I can't imagine an organization that derives it income from selling standards by the page would ever find a proposal for a new standard wanting, so he'll probably succeed in getting ISO involved, and if we are unlucky, ITU decides to wait for ISO, and thus he will set a final decision on leap-seconds back another 10 years. At least that's what usually happens when ISO gets involved... Long live Parkinssons law... Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
