Re: GNOME Foundation Board Meeting Minutes :: 7/6/07

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On 6/10/07, Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 10, 2007 at 08:18:54PM -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > On 6/10/07, Glynn Foster <Glynn Foster sun com> wrote:
> > > 1) ECMA
> > >
> > >    We have the opportunity of joining ECMA as a non-profit
> > >    member. Jody has expressed an interest in being a representative
> > >    for GNOME, and suggested it would also be good to get someone
> > >    there from Abiword.
> > >
> > >    ACTION: Behdad to contact Jody about the ECMA membership application
> > >            and find a good candidate from Abiword to attend. Behdad to
> > >            work on getting a press release for our membership.
> >
> > What would our purpose be there?
>
> As a non-profit we (GNOME) would not have voting privileges.
> The membership will serve as a mechanism to allow interested
> foundation members to join ECMA committees.  I'm advocating this in
> relation to ECMA376/TC45 aka MS OfficeOpen XML.  Committee members
> have the ability to request clarifications and suggest improvements
> in the text of the specification.  For anyone implementing parts of
> this format this is a golden chance to get enough documentation to
> facilitate interoperability.

Seems reasonable.

Of course, I'd be more comfortable with it if we put out a press
release saying something to the effect of 'we see no way to avoid
implementing OOXML without screwing our users, so we're joining ECMA
to make sure it sucks as little as possible. All other things being
equal, we'd much prefer to implement a spec that has a much better
patent grant, was developed through a more public process, uses open
standards like mathml, etc., but since MS has a dominant market
position, we don't have much of a choice in the matter.'

Luis