A Standards Primer

I have recently had several long discussions about the motivations and machinations that surround the development of technology interoperability standards. Over the past few years, I've also captured a lot of ideas and experience on the blog. I pulled it all together into one place in the following paper, "Understanding Technology Standardization Efforts" (PDF 86.2K).

For the record, I was a long term participant in the POSIX and UNIX standardization efforts. I was a working group participant, balloted many pieces of the standards and their amendments, and participated in the management of the standards effort at the IEEE as both an inaugural member of the Project Management Committee and a voting member of the Sponsor Executive Committee. I was an international participant at ISO, as document editor, and participated on behalf of three different national body delegations (Canada, U.S., UK) over a number of years. I began my participation in 1989 as a customer (working for EDS with GM and the U.S. government as their primary POSIX-interested customers), but quickly ended up as a vendor, working for MKS developing a conforming POSIX.2 implementation that formed the basis of implementations from IBM, DEC, HP, UNISYS and Sun. In 1995, I put my money where my mouth was on the importance of applications portability, standards and the coming juggernaut of NT and co-founded Softway Systems, implementing the POSIX and UNIX standards on NT to enable UNIX applications to be directly migrated to the platform. A large amount of free and open source software was incorporated into the product. Softway Systems was acquired by Microsoft in 1999, and I worked there for five years. Over the years I've been in regular contact with people standardizing C#/CLI, the Linux Standards Base, and ODF.

Several friends and colleagues from the standards world have reviewed the paper and provided excellent comments. The paper is much better for it. All mistakes obviously remain my own.

Comments

[Wesley Parish]

FWIW, I picked up a book on the Liberty Ship, "The Liberty Ship in Peacetime", at the local city library the other day and browsed the front part of it. The reason why the Liberty ship was such a successful program was the rigid adherence to standards, that allowed factories somewhere else to build the accommodation quarters for example, and send them to the dockyards, where they could be fitted to the hulls with the minimum of hassle. It was quite an eye-opener. The other major contribution standardisation made to that conflict that I was aware of, was the improvement that Packard made when licensing the building of the Merlin engine. Rolls Royce were apparently somewhat haphazard. ;) Among the greatest aero-engines in the world, and batches differed such that they and their repairs couldn't be easily interchanged.