On 9 Sep 2009, at 11:22, Sam Johnston wrote:

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Mark Little <mlittle@redhat.com> wrote:
Bill's on vacation this week so he may have a different perspective, but I don't have a problem with the statement as it's made, i.e., Red Hat having a permanent position on the board. I've been involved with standards for 20+ years through OMG, OASIS, W3C, WS-I, GGF, JCP and others. What's proposed in the whole effort around REST-* is far less Evil Empire and far more Benign Coordinator. If we have problems with the approach in the future of course we can re-examine it, but at this stage I think it's fine.

Ok so let me put it another way: you don't see a problem with a provider of services covered by standards bestowing themselves a privileged position in the standards setting organisation? I certainly do.

This is where you're misunderstanding. At present REST-* isn't a standards body. It's not funded by member organizations, for instance. It's not Eclipse. It's not W3C. It's a community in the same way that Apache or JBoss.org is a community. When/if the REST-* community decides to take whatever we work on to an independent standards body then all of that changes and I'd expect us to be on the same footing as everyone else.

This isn't (or at least need not be) the DMTF or WS-I or indeed any traditional organisation complete with arcane rules, preferential votes, founding fathers, etc. In any case I'm sure the others all consider themselves "benign coordinators" too. The most successful standards these days by far (think OpenID, OAuth, WHAT WG's take on HTML5) come from loose-knit communities of equals.

At the end of the day it's your show and you can run it how you like, but with policies like this it will likely remain your show as I can't imagine others in the cloud space (like Canonical) signing up for it.

This isn't specifically about Cloud. Believe it or not but REST existed before Cloud came along. This is a community effort around REST usage wherever that may occur. What gives you the impression REST-* is Cloud specific?

VMware may be able to lead its competitors by the nose but with an effective monopoly in the [on-premises] virtualisation space that's hardly surprising - I don't see anyone else having that kind of control in the cloud space.

As the community grows, if there are problems in the way in which it is managed then I would fully expect us to look at them and revisit any decisions. As I said above, this is a community effort. It's meant to be open. We don't want to fall into the same situation as, say, Sun with the JCP.

Mark.



Sam

On 8 Sep 2009, at 18:46, Sam Johnston wrote:

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 7:20 PM, David Lutterkort <lutter@redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 18:28 -0400, Bob McWhirter wrote:
> I personally think that we might want to leverage the community
> that'll also be building around REST-* (http://jboss.org/reststar).
> There, the intent it to build RESTful APIs (but not necessarily
> implementations) for things like messaging, transactions, and storage.

Very cool; the world will definitely be a better place with agreement on
API's in those areas.

This all sounds very similar to my vision for OGF's OCCI and is exactly why I've split off core from infrastructure concerns - it definitely sounds like we should be collaborating more in future.

FWIW REST-* sounds like something I could get behind but to be completely candid (as always) I'm disappointed to see similar governance shenanigans to those that undermined the WS-I: "Red Hat, as the founder of REST-*, gets a permanent seat on the board. All other board members must be elected by the overall membership once a year". If it's not too late then please reconsider this position.

Sam

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Mark Little

JBoss, by Red Hat
Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SI4 1TE, United Kingdom.
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---
Mark Little

JBoss, by Red Hat
Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SI4 1TE, United Kingdom.
Registered in UK and Wales under Company Registration No. 3798903 Directors: Michael Cunningham (USA), Charlie Peters (USA), Matt Parsons (USA) and Brendan Lane (Ireland).