On Sun, 2012-07-29 at 13:28 -0700, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
Do you think that corporate domination of "open" standards development is
OK?
The barrier for participation is low since there are no membership fees, etc.
For participation, yes, all that is needed is an email account; if one
wishes to attend meetings (just the main ones - let's ignore interims),
the bar rises considerably. The chances of dominating a WG or attaining
a leadership position in the IETF are very close to zero without meeting
attendance. I spend about 10% of my gross income on travel, meeting
fees, etc. for IETF meetings; I don't consider that to be trivial.
Nevertheless, those who participate in standardization efforts have to spend
their time.
And somebody's money: I spend about 10% of my gross income on travel,
meeting fees, etc. for IETF meetings; I don't consider that to be
trivial.
So, typically those who participate for a longer period of time need to have
some incentives. These incentives often come from working for a specific
company.
We cannot force anyone to participate in any of our working groups. In the
OAuth case we have lots of other people participating but they typically ask
questions and provide implementation feedback rather than trying to steer the
standardization work.
Ciao
Hannes
PS: Eran was also working for a big corporation, namely Yahoo. I could
imagine that Yahoo also had some incentives to pay Eran for his participation
in this work.