Re: [office] good bye

[Duane Nickull <dnickull@adobe.com>]

All:

With a truly neutral perspective, I can appreciate points on both sides. The
end result though is that I do believe that OASIS has acted fairly, however
it still seems somewhat unfair from the perspective of those affected.  I
say this on my own accord and my PoV does no reflect my employer or any
others.

Bruce, Andreas and others provide an in valuable service to the standards
world and IMO have gone way over the call of duty to provide value not only
to OASIS, but to people all over the world.  I can see the work they have
provided over the years and believe the value is worth the price of an
individual membership a hundred fold.  Even though I do not always agree
with their perspectives, having their input has been instrumental for
developing ODF and getting adoption of ODF.

On the other hand, OASIS is an organization that has to pay bills and
operate with an impartial and balanced set of rules.  They cannot pay their
bills with contributions and good will alone.  They do need $$.

I have no suggestions for a resolution.  I apologize if you read this far
and expected a really good resolution as mine is just a patch.

In an ideal world, others who benefited from the contributions would step up
and help.  With that in mind, life has been good to me and I will personally
endorse and support Bruce for a personal OASIS membership as he has provided
both myself an my employer with the value of his intellect over the years.
This is not from Adobe but from me personally.  For some reason, I seem to
keep having good luck and believe that it mist be for a higher purpose to
help my community.  If this is how I can help, I am more than happy to do
so.

Bruce - please let me know if this is acceptable.  I hope others who benefit
might come forward for other members.

Duane


On 5/16/07 8:56 PM, "Patrick Durusau" <patrick@durusau.net> wrote:

> Andreas,
> 
> I am sorry that you will not be continuing as a member of the TC. I am
> sure the formula folks welcomed the presence of mathematicians.
> 
> I do disagree with the last point in your post:
> 
> Andreas J Guelzow wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 
>>  
>> 
> <snip>
> 
>> I find the decision to be removed from the OpenFormula SC quite
>> disturbing because of what it says about the the relationship of OASIS
>> with those of us who are free software developers without being
>> associated with commercial interests.
>> 
>>  
>> 
> I have maintained my personal membership in OASIS even when I have been
> employed by employers who had corporate memberships in OASIS.
> 
> Why? Well, because for an organization like OASIS that makes all of its
> output freely available to anyone who wishes to read it (contrary to the
> practice of some standards bodies) memberships are how OASIS sponsors
> all of the TC activities, the websites associated with those TCs, the
> Cover Pages (which have been *the* place for information on markup
> languages for longer than I care to remember), ebXML.org, XML.org, as
> well as maintaining liasions with other standards bodies.
> 
> None of that happens for free. Like all the rest of us the staff who
> makes those things happen have bills to pay as well as paying for
> offices, web servers, software and the like.
> 
> I have had and do have differences with OASIS over both procedural as
> well as substantive issues but like members of any other healthy
> community, we can disagree and yet still work together to have what I
> consider to be an outstanding standards organization. True, there are
> those "nasty" vendors but amazingly enough, I have close friends among
> many if not all of them. We don't always agree since we have different
> interests in particular issues. But anyone who has an ideological purity
> test for associates is only going to need a very small room for meetings.
> 
> Considering the vast array of resources sponsored by OASIS and the
> opportunity to work with people from the widest variety of interests on
> technical projects, I think OASIS is one of the best membership bargains
> available. True you get back what you put into it but that is true for
> any organization.
> 
> I hope you will reconsider your decision to not continue as an OASIS member.
> 
> Hope you are having a great day!
> 
> Patrick