Proposal for Charter Requirements section, was Which is definitive odf?

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

USE CASE:

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 7:23 AM, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Looking at 1.1 on the Oasis site,
> http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#opendocumentv1.1
> a number of different formats are offered.
>
> Which is the definitive standard definition please?
> Anyone know?
> 3 versions are offered.

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

It's even worse than the particular muddle you ask about because even
which version of ODF is the definitive version depends on legal
context. In the nations signatory to the Agreement on Technical
Barriers to Trade and the Agreement on Government Procurement, all
levels of government are required to use the ISO/IEC:26300 version of
Open document as their technical regulations,and procurement
specification if they want to specify ODF for their purposes.

In the non-governmental sector, ODF 1.1 is a standard than may
lawfully  be specified.

The comedy/tragedy is that all of the most featureful ODF
implementations  moved on without retaining the ability to write to
ISO/IEC:26300. What's out there in the real world is somewhere between
ODF 1.1 and ODF 1.2, which is not yet finished and with Microsoft
joining the ODF TC to work on that version, I'll be really surprised
if there are not major changes to the draft ODF v. 1.2.

Bottom  line: Any governments in the member nations using current
versions of the most featureful ODF apps are doing so illegally.

Proposed Charter Requirement -- Conformance requirement for all profile work

All profiles submitted to OASIS for adoption as a standard shall
clearly and unambiguously require that a conforming implementation of
the profile shall provide the user and user agent with the ability to
write to all earlier adopted versions of such profile at the option of
the user or user agent and shall enable the user or user agent to set
any earlier adopted version of the profile as the default profile of
that profile type.

Best regards,

Paul E. Merrell, J.D. (Marbux)

-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>