RE: [oasis-charter-discuss] RAND for Requirements?

["Abbie Barbir" <abbieb@nortel.com>]

Patrick
RAND is a common mode of operation for Telecom industry.
This has nothing to do with marketing, it only has to do with allowing
Telecom providers to operate in SDO using the same environment that they
are used to.

Have a nice day
Regards
Abbie


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Durusau [mailto:patrick@durusau.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 7:25 PM
To: oasis-charter-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [oasis-charter-discuss] RAND for Requirements?

Greetings!

The reasons given for RAND for this TC:

Orit Levin:
> 1. This TC is NOT going to produce any technical specifications.
> 2. This TC is about gathering requirements backed up by use cases and 
> scenarios and their applicability to existing technologies.
> 3. This TC is about bringing as many as possible telecoms and vendors 
> working in the Telecom area who feel most comfortable with RAND to 
> contribute to the discussion.
and, Abbie Barbir:

> Plus I would add that we will be dealing with other SDO such as TM 
> Forum, ITU-T etc.. and  working closely with them to get requirements 
> from their documents. These SDO operate under RAND and as such this 
> make the flow of information between the OASIS SOA TC and the other 
> SDO more fluid.
Seem very unpersuasive to me.

First, I can't say that I am familiar with the practice of treating
requirements as IPR. Can someone point me to known legal authority for
the notion that a requirement is subject to some vendor's IPR? (Granting
that if I publish a book with a list of requirements, my statement of
the requirement may be copyrighted, i.e., "Text must be presented in a
*bold* font." (copyright Patrick Durusau 2008) but the substance of the
requirement itself, that is that users want to use *bold* text, I don't
think is subject to any IPR claim.)

Second, from what has been said the TC doesn't intend to produce
anything that is subject to any known IPR claim, thereby rendering RAND
rather meaningless.

Third, following up on Abbie's comment, is making this TC operate under
RAND a marketing strategy to make it more attractive to vendors who
aren't advised well enough to realize that requirements are not subject
to IPR? Or who take false comfort from committees that operate under
RAND?

While I am all for marketing OASIS as much as the next person I think
offering meaningless RAND on material that cannot be the subject of IPR
is a very bad marketing strategy. What do we say to those vendors who
falsely took our word that the requirements produced by this TC were
subject to RAND? Some dreaded FOSS group implements technology to meet
those requirements more cheaply and efficiently than commercial vendors.

Then what do we say? No, let's be honest up front with all our members,
even commercial vendors.

BTW, I think anyone who charters a TC under RAND should have to specify
what IP is being contributed under what conditions so that OASIS members
can make a determination as to whether they wish to participate or not. 
As far as I can tell at this point, neither Microsoft nor Nortel have
any IP as traditionally understood to contribute to this TC. So, why the
RAND? (Other than for false advertising purposes.)

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

--
Patrick Durusau
patrick@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)


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