Hurrah! - General Motors gets a seat on the OASIS board
Today, OASIS
announced the election of John Jackson of General Motors to its Board of Directors. This is great news. For too long vendors have played the standards card as a means of allaying customers’ and more importantly (for the vendors at least) potential customers’ concerns about the threat of lock in, but have left largely to their own devices when it comes to setting those standards, as the words of the new board Chairman, Eduardo Gutentag of Sun, clearly indicate: "There was a time when the task of working on OASIS standards was mainly left to vendors.”
OASIS is the primary standards-setting body for the higher-level web services specifications, with the W3C responsible for those at the bottom of the stack, and it is critical that technology adopters are in a position of influence when it comes to the governance of the processes by which those standards are defined. The success of the
Liberty Alliance Project in addressing the “technical, business and policy challenges around identity and identity-based Web services” is due, in no small part, to the involvement of the likes of Fidelity Investments and General Motors (again!)
in its Management Board. Hopefully, the participation of General Motors is only the start and over time we will see more board-level involvement from technology adopters in the likes of OASIS and the
Web Services Interoperability Organisation (WS-I). The latter, incidentally, would benefit from far greater participation generally, let alone at board level, given its focus on one of the oft-touted benefits of Web Services protocols for users of IT.
The recent challenges faced by the Apache Foundation with its implementation of WS-Security (see David Berlind’s excellent analysis
over at Between The Lines), which stem from OASIS’ licensing and intellectual property policies, suggest it is high time for representatives from the open source community to join the other standards stakeholders at the directors’ table.
