I'd like to wade in slightly here if I may as I've been following this
thread with great interest.
I guess that I might be in a vaguely interesting position as although my
employers are interested in and make use of AMQP/Qpid my contributions
to this group have been entirely at a personal level and not on behalf
of an employer, simply because I think it's interesting and worthwhile.
The reason I mention that is in relation to organisations like OASIS.
So I find myself rather torn, I really agree with Gordon and Ted on one
hand about innovation and driving things bottom up (decent standards
tend to come with "reference implementations") but on the other hand
I've got a lot of sympathy with Rob and his colleagues who very much
have a position that a primary concern and motivation has to be
standardisation, particularly Open Standards and they must be seen to be
platform neutral - so fundamentally AMQP first and Qpid second. To me
that's a reasonable position too because, as has been expressed
elsewhere, one of the compelling reasons of "why AMQP" is because it's
an Open Standard and *should be* interoperable. Sadly that wasn't really
achieved for 0.10, but it certainly seems to be the case for 1.0 which I
feel we ought to embrace with a passion.
But why I mention OASIS, well TBH I have a bit of a problem with them in
the sense that they are putting together Open Standards for sure, but I
don't really believe that the process for achieving said standards seems
to be in any way open and transparent!!
One of the reasons that I like Apache is the fundamental doctrine of
openness and having a licence that is non-restrictive, so products can
be used most anywhere. We're in a position where organisations and
individuals can contribute and is essentially democratic/meritocratic -
that feels like a healthy place to be in the 21st Century.
The same can't be said of OASIS, so someone like myself just might have
vaguely relevant experiences with management say, but there's no real
avenue for contribution because it's a bit of a "closed shop" made up of
fairly large organisations who have to pay a non-trivial fee for
membership (I'm keen, but I'm not *that* keen :-)). Now I can sympathise
a bit and I'm sure that part of the motivation is paranoia about
avoidance of potential submarine patents probably driven by some of the
big players, but I can't help believe that there might be better and
more open ways to achieve the same goals (those guys can afford some
decent lawyers after all :-)).
One of the things about OASIS that worries me as an outsider is how much
of the decision making ends up getting driven by some corporate agenda -
after all if you've got a product to sell there might be benefits in
shaping the direction of a standard to best suit your architecture or
roadmap and potentially give some commercial advantage. I'm not accusing
any organisation of doing such a thing and I'm sure that it's all lovely
and altruistic, but without openness and transparency it's hard to say
for sure. If I'm honest given where AMQP sits in the protocol stack I
often wonder why the hell it's OASIS and not say IETF that holds the
standard, from what I can see OASIS seems to sit rather more at the
"higher end of the stack" formalising B2B interoperability whereas AMQP
1.0 seems to have evolved into something arguably closer to a network
layer protocol (after all we're on a thread about routers :-)).
Anyway this probably hasn't added much to the discussion and has turned
a bit into a polemic about openness and transparency so sorry about
that, but I'm quite passionate that it's healthier for an Open Source
model to encompass more than just "a bit of code" and I think that when
we're talking about Open Standards the Open Source model should extend
out to ideas and architectures as well - you've probably noted from my
"how it all hangs together" post that I'm keen for a visible, open,
modular architecture :-)
Bottom line is what I'd *really* like to see is Qpid components working
towards and enabling Open Standards and I'd like to see OASIS opening up
a bit and being more practical. FWIW I'm a little nervous about the
Management Specification and probably won't feel happy until we've got
something kickable, I've read it a couple of times and it still feels a
little abstract and open to interpretation, but that's largely in the
nature of these things, which is why reference implementations are good
and should help the standards evolve.
Regards,
Frase
On 11/10/13 21:36, Gordon Sim wrote:
On 10/11/2013 06:33 PM, William Henry wrote:
Yes Ted, and Gordon I believe, has been involved in trying to get
this feedback based on our experiences.
Simplify to clarify: I am no longer involved in any way with OASIS.
Further, any opinions I expressed while I was there were my own and
did not in any way represent the views of my employer or any of my
colleagues.
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