Re: [DotGNU]dotgnu community on orkut.com

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Saturday 07 February 2004 11:13 am, Fergus Henderson wrote:

> More information please.  Could someone, e.g. Rhys, please confirm or
> deny that Rhys has been excluded from participation in ECMA meetings?

For the last three years, I've been trying to get Portable.NET some presence 
in the ECMA working group, even if just as an observer able to see early 
drafts at the same time as group members and comment on them.

Every attempt has been met with "join the ECMA and then attend regular face to 
face meetings in the US and then we'll consider if we want to invite you to 
be a permanent member".  Even the cheapest applicable category of ECMA 
membership is A$20,000+ per year, and that's before plane fares, 
accomodation, etc.  (There are apparently cheaper rates for non-profit 
organisations, but Southern Storm is registered as a full company, not a 
non-profit).

If I had that kind of money, I would prefer to pay people to write code, not 
waste it on membership fees and airfares.  I also consider it unacceptable 
for the working group to set conditions that deliberately discriminate 
against interested parties on financial grounds and then have the audacity to 
call themselves an "open standards group".  There are only 10 people in the 
world who are qualified to be in the group, and I'm definitely one of them.

It's not like publishing drafts on the Web, or running a discussion mailing 
list is expensive.  It's practically zero cost.  But every time I've 
approached them about it, I get a repeat of "the rules is the rules".

The current situation is this: the ECMA continues to build buggy standards, 
with little community input, that are months out of date by the time of 
release.  And issues that I need group guidance on (PInvoke for Unix, object 
file formats, C language bindings, etc) are not being dealt with.  Myself, 
I've barely looked at their stuff for months, preferring the more accurate 
information from Microsoft's .NET Framework.

I'm more than willing to join the group.  As soon as they are open in more 
than just name.  Right now, the ECMA is an old boy's network, and I fully 
understand why Sun pulled Java out so many years ago.  The ECMA is 
non-functional in its current form.

Cheers,

Rhys.