With standards, do we get what we deserve?
I've been meaning to blog on
this story from the Register for ages, but it got lost somewhere deep in my pile of "blog on these things" messages to myself...
It's no secret that IT industry standards bodies are hotbeds of jockeying and jostling - especially as vendors get ever smarter about ways to use standardisation processes to both make themselves more "open", and keep ahead of the competition at the same time (for an example, see JEE - many of the "enhancements" suggested over the years by the big middleware platform vendors have been engineered to make the resulting standards pretty difficult for small vendors to get certified against. Also, it's no secret that many a proposing vendor will seek to push a standard based on something they've already developed, so giving them a head-start in having a "compliant implementation").
So anything that organisations which buy IT can do to get involved with standardisation processes has to be a Good Thing - helps to keep the vendors honest, and with any luck helps to make sure that new standards actually standardise things that are actually useful. Traditionally some of the big telcos and financial institutions - the companies with the longest and most complicated histories in terms of IT use, in other words - have put time and budget aside to participate. But overall, standardisation efforts are 99% driven by vendors.
Why? Are standards somehow operating outside other market dynamics, which should be driven by what people actually want and need?
Perhaps now, in this time of open source communities, commons and participation, it's time for "users" (what a horrible word) to think about moving beyond contributing code to open implementations, to contributing ideas to open standards?
The Liberty Alliance appears to a case in point: it has involved big IT users since the outset who've kept the vendors honest - and it is one of the few standards bodies that is driven by use cases.
What do you think?
