Re: OASIS Membership: was [Re:...disbursement of Debian funds]
>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> writes:
Steve> Thank you, to both you and Martin, for putting my mind at
Steve> ease. Although I'm not personally convinced yet of the
Steve> importance of OASIS membership to our overall mission, I'm
Steve> at least mollified that others haven't made this decision
Steve> on the project's behalf.
And if the DPL had made this decision on the project's behalf, that
would have been perfectly reasonable. We did elect him to b e our
leader after all.
Allowing Debian developers to contribute to standardization work can
be an important part of allowing us to work on free software. I often
Remember, we are an OS vendor. Most of the other OS vendors--people
like Sun, IBM and Apple--find that they need to work within standards
organizations to make sure the standards that are produced meet their
users' needs. You can make an argument that because Debian just
packages software, that the individual packages that depend on the
standards should be part of the standardization effort rather than
Debian. I believe this is wrong for two reasons:
1) Debian as an organization can better afford the $1000 than can
individual open-source projects in Debian.
2) Debian has a broader focus than any one package. AS such, we are
concerned with issues of uniformity of specification, use of
similar methods to solve similar problems, etc, that are important
to our product and to our users even though they may be less
important to any single package. Debian developers representing
Debian's needs in a standardization effort can better represent
these concerns than people representing specific packages.
$1000 for participation in any working group of a standards body is
cheap. It seems worth the price even if individuals don't want to
donate to cover it. It seems like allowing the DPL to make these
decisions is also appropriate.
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