[rights] Charter as justification

["DuCharme, Bob (LNG)" <bob.ducharme@lexisnexis.com>]

After reviewing the charter, I'm still not satisfied with the answer that I
received in yesterday's conference call about how the scheduling strategy
was determined and how that process relates to OASIS TC procedure. 

Paragraphs 4 and 5 of the RLTC charter talk about defining relationships
with other standards bodies. They do not specify which standards bodies,
other than mentioning SAML as an example, and they certainly do not specify
the steps to be taken to define those relationships. Nor does "promote the
maintenance of a Core architecture" prioritize this architecture's
recipients or identify one recipient's schedule as the driver for our own.

Given this, there's absolutely nothing to back up the increasingly voiced
assertions that our schedule must be built around MPEG's milestones because
it's in the TC's charter. Calling this strategy "implicit" achieves nothing,
because we can all read whatever we want into the explicit language, call it
implicit, and it won't get us anywhere. 

There's been a lot of sensible talk about the value of the opportunity of
having MPEG use our work as their core. The transition from acknowledging
this opportunity to planning around it as an obligation is not based on
anything in the charter and was not done by any democratic process. This is
my big problem with it. 

I was going to write a paragraph discussing the tradeoff of taking advantage
of this opportunity versus the disadvantages of rushing XrML 2.1.1
requirements to MPEG and calling it an OASIS work product, but this is a
discussion we need to have in a meeting. The very fact that this discussion
was never held is what worries me so much about the way the business of the
TC is being conducted.

Bob DuCharme
Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis
Data Architecture, Editorial Systems and Content Engineering