The Open Web Foundation, a non-profit organization intended to help create an "Open Web," was announced Thursday at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) in Portland, Ore.
Specifically, the organization is dedicated to the development and protection of non-proprietary specifications for Web technologies. The effort was announced by David Recordon of blogging tools maker Six Apart.
As described on its Web page [
http://openwebfoundation.org ], the foundation "is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."
The foundation is attempting to break the trend of building separation foundations for each specification. Details regarding membership, governance, and intellectual property rights will be posted in the coming weeks.
Individuals such as Geir Magnusson, a vice president and board member at Apache, and Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, are participating in the Open Web Foundation. Organizations that support the foundation include Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, BBC, O'Reilly, Plaxo, Six Apart, SourceForce, and Vidoop.
[
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=... ]
An early way I'm describing the Open Web Foundation is (as Scott says)
not a Standards Body, but a "IPR DMZ" - (an intellectual property
rights demilitarized zone).
Most folks who are hearing about this haven't directly participated in
a community standards effort, or a more formal standards body. They
think the W3C/IETF/OASIS "covers it".
But I think the sense of folks here is that there needs to be
something lighter weight that's only focused on the minimum needed for
a spec to become widely adoptable. For me, thats IPR hygiene -- almost
everything else can be done *easily* without an org (save, maybe the
organizational standup of a new org to hold/manage IPR). Having
slogged through this IPR policy stuff several times,I'm really happy
to see this effort to create a reusable framework for community
efforts. I only hope it remains lightweight and facilitates the widest
range of community efforts as possible.
-Gabe Wachob
[ from the Discussion Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/open-web-discuss ]
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