twisty

The Players__________________

  • FSF
  • FSG
  • IEEE

  • IETF

  • W3C

  • ISO

  • ECMA

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The Players

FSF - Free Software Foundation - Cabal? Has set certain standards for software to be accepted into GNU, adopted by others.

FSG - Free Standards Group - Subscription membership group. Platinum, gold, silver, nonprofit. Mostly corporations with a strong US presence. Linux Standard Base.

IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc - Prolific publisher and learned membership body for electrical engineering, computing and control.

IETF - Internet Engineering Task Force - ISoc, IEngSteerGp, IAB, IANA, IResTF - Keeper of the RFC process, defining internet protocols. No formal membership. Comments in RFC3160.

W3C - World Wide Web Consortium - Subscription membership group. Issues Technical Reports and encourages free software testbed implementations. Generates RFCs for web protocols, submitted to IETF.

ISO - International Standardisation Organisation - 145 national standards bodies (eg BSI, ANSI). Occasionally publishes computing standards, but not main focus.

ECMA-I - European Computer Manufacturers Association International - Subscription membership group. Publishes standards mostly about hardware, but recently software too.

FSF

\- FSD, GCS

FSG

\- LSB

IEEE

\- POSIX, Scheme...

IETF

\- SMTP, NNTP, HTTP, GZIP...

W3C

\- HTTP, XML, HTML, CSS, ...

ISO

\- ISO-10646 (Unicode), ISO-9899:1999 (C), ISO-9945-2:1993 (POSIX)...

ECMA-I

\- CLI, C#, ECMAscript, ...

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The Benefits of Standards

  • Portability
  • Implementability
  • Compatibility

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The Problems of Standards

  • Conservatism
  • Participation, Relevance
  • Copyrights

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The Dangers for Standards

  • Patentability
  • Publication pricing
  • Marketing

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