OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

Hi,

Until recently I was only an observer on the TC but a member of the
OpenFormula SC where I have been somewhat active and hopefully helpful.
I was then told that that is an impossible situation and so became a TC
member to be able to continue on the OpenFormula TC. I am now also one
of the foundation members that will not any longer be on the TC or SC.

Why am I interested in ODF/OpenFormula? I am one of the Gnumeric
maintainers and as such have some experience with work sheet formulas.
The fact that I am a mathematician has also been quite handy in this
context.

My employer has no interest in the odf/openformula issue. Personally I
have no financial interests in that work so cannot really justify
financing my own membership.

I find the decision to be removed from the OpenFormula SC quite
disturbing because of what it says about the the relationship of OASIS
with those of us who are free software developers without being
associated with commercial interests. 

Andreas

-- 
"Liberty consists less in acting according to
one's own pleasure, than in not being subject 
to the will and pleasure of other people. It 
consists also in our not subjecting the wills 
of other people to our own."  Rousseau


Prof. Dr. Andreas J. Guelzow
Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta

Andreas,

I am sorry that you will not be continuing as a member of the TC. I am 
sure the formula folks welcomed the presence of mathematicians.

I do disagree with the last point in your post:

Andreas J Guelzow wrote:

>Hi,
>
>
>  
>

All:

With a truly neutral perspective, I can appreciate points on both sides. The
end result though is that I do believe that OASIS has acted fairly, however
it still seems somewhat unfair from the perspective of those affected.  I
say this on my own accord and my PoV does no reflect my employer or any
others.

Bruce, Andreas and others provide an in valuable service to the standards
world and IMO have gone way over the call of duty to provide value not only
to OASIS, but to people all over the world.  I can see the work they have
provided over the years and believe the value is worth the price of an
individual membership a hundred fold.  Even though I do not always agree
with their perspectives, having their input has been instrumental for
developing ODF and getting adoption of ODF.

On the other hand, OASIS is an organization that has to pay bills and
operate with an impartial and balanced set of rules.  They cannot pay their
bills with contributions and good will alone.  They do need $$.

I have no suggestions for a resolution.  I apologize if you read this far
and expected a really good resolution as mine is just a patch.

In an ideal world, others who benefited from the contributions would step up
and help.  With that in mind, life has been good to me and I will personally
endorse and support Bruce for a personal OASIS membership as he has provided
both myself an my employer with the value of his intellect over the years.
This is not from Adobe but from me personally.  For some reason, I seem to
keep having good luck and believe that it mist be for a higher purpose to
help my community.  If this is how I can help, I am more than happy to do
so.

Bruce - please let me know if this is acceptable.  I hope others who benefit
might come forward for other members.

Duane


On 5/16/07 8:56 PM, "Patrick Durusau" 

Duane Nickull wrote:
> On the other hand, OASIS is an organization that has to pay bills and
> operate with an impartial and balanced set of rules.  They cannot pay their
> bills with contributions and good will alone.  They do need $$.

Absolutely. In addition, OASIS must also have rules to ensure fairness, 
for example, by not letting one organization dominate any given TC. I 
should note, however, that a non-profit organization like the 
OpenDocument Foundation does pay a membership fee. A non-profit does not 
get a free ride at OASIS.

I don't know how much the ODF Foundation pays for membership. Judging 
from this page:

http://www.oasis-open.org/join/categories.php

My guess would be that it's either $1,100 or $3,200. That's enough to 
cover either 4 or 8 individual memberships respectively. I believe that 
it would be fair enough for the non-profit to be allowed as many 
representatives as their fee would cover if that money were reused for 
individual memberships. I believe that this is a more reasonable balance 
between the two extremes of either allowing a non-profit to have an 
arbitrary number of representatives or only allowing two 
representatives. I doubt that anyone would argue that this is unfair to 
OASIS.

I hope that OASIS representatives will consider this alternative.

Thank you for listening.

Best wishes,
Daniel Carrera.

On Wed, 2007-16-05 at 20:52 +0100, Daniel wrote:
> Duane Nickull wrote:
> > On the other hand, OASIS is an organization that has to pay bills and
> > operate with an impartial and balanced set of rules.  They cannot pay their
> > bills with contributions and good will alone.  They do need $$.
> 
> Absolutely. In addition, OASIS must also have rules to ensure fairness, 
> for example, by not letting one organization dominate any given TC. 

Are there such rules? It was my understanding that a member organisation
could have an arbitrary number of representatives on a TC (provided they
are all employees of that organisation).

Andreas



-- 

Prof. Dr. Andreas J. Guelzow
Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences
Concordia University College of Alberta

Hi Andreas,

On Wednesday, 2007-05-16 10:13:38 -0600, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:

> I am now also one
> of the foundation members that will not any longer be on the TC or SC.

I'm sorry to hear that.

> Why am I interested in ODF/OpenFormula? I am one of the Gnumeric
> maintainers and as such have some experience with work sheet formulas.
> The fact that I am a mathematician has also been quite handy in this
> context.

Absolutely. Let me thank you again for your valuable contribution to our
formula work.

I find the current situation where several contributors of different
free open source spreadsheet applications don't have a TC/SC membership
anymore very unpleasant.

> My employer has no interest in the odf/openformula issue. Personally I
> have no financial interests in that work so cannot really justify
> financing my own membership.

I hope you will continue to attend our work nevertheless and we'll hear
about your thoughts at least via the comments list.

  Eike

-- 
 OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS

Eike Rathke:
> I find the current situation where several contributors of different
> free open source spreadsheet applications don't have a TC/SC membership
> anymore very unpleasant....
> I hope you will continue to attend our work nevertheless and we'll hear
> about your thoughts at least via the comments list.

I agree with all of those sentiments.  I was Internet-inaccessible all last week, and I'm just learning about some of these events in OASIS that broke last week (including what _appears_ to me to be a significant rules change, though I'm currently still reading).

It's my hope that something can be or will be worked out.  No matter what happens, I'd like to publicly thank EVERYONE who has ever worked on the formula specification.  Thanks!

--- David A. Wheeler

David,

No, no rules change.

As has been stated before, the TC chair can apply for a membership fee 
waiver for experts who are needed to contribute to a particular activity.

Sorry to hear you were off line all week! Well, unless it was a vacation 
or something like that. ;-)

Hope you are having a great day!

Patrick

David A. Wheeler wrote:

>Eike Rathke:
>  
>
>>I find the current situation where several contributors of different
>>free open source spreadsheet applications don't have a TC/SC membership
>>anymore very unpleasant....
>>I hope you will continue to attend our work nevertheless and we'll hear
>>about your thoughts at least via the comments list.
>>    
>>
>
>I agree with all of those sentiments.  I was Internet-inaccessible all last week, and I'm just learning about some of these events in OASIS that broke last week (including what _appears_ to me to be a significant rules change, though I'm currently still reading).
>
>It's my hope that something can be or will be worked out.  No matter what happens, I'd like to publicly thank EVERYONE who has ever worked on the formula specification.  Thanks!
>
>--- David A. Wheeler
>
>
>  
>

-- 
Patrick Durusau
Patrick@Durusau.net
Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005

Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work! 

Patrick Durusau:
> Sorry to hear you were off line all week! Well, unless it was a vacation 
> or something like that. ;-)

A long-awaited vacation, thankfully :-).

I do not know what I can do, but I'm sure it will take me a little while just to burrow through my in-box.  I've received a LARGE pile of private emails this past week, both on this and some unrelated topics, as well as all of the OASIS postings.  My thanks to all of you who have offered advice and other comments; you're not being ignored, it's just taking time to get there.  Please bear with me!

--- David A. Wheeler