Asif Haswarey wrote:
Tarl Neustaedter wrote: ...
It would be good if openbios participants revived the standard, but it
takes a lot of effort.
How would you categorize this "lot of effort"?
- Technical
- Political
Hi Asif -
We had an off-line conversation trading warstories about committee meetings and a lot of experience from when Mitch standardized 1275 in the first place.
IEEE has a number of requirements on what the committee has to contain, in terms of diversity of backgrounds (industry, academia, ect.), which we don't have here. Getting enough people from the right backgrounds would be painful, and probably we'd end up having to teach some of them the basics so they could contribute.
At a guess, the amount of effort (assuming no underlying disagreements) would be about six months of committee time (call it half-time for the committee members and full time for a chair or editor). Then you'd have to come up with the up-front money the standards organization is apt to want - it depends what umbrella organization is picked.
Note that committee work is expensive; you can't do it all over phone calls, you have to have periodic face-to-face meetings to make progress, where you can stick a bunch of people in a room and not let them out for twelve hours :-). Seriously, getting the members in a room where they *have* to pay attention is critical to making progress. This means a lot of travel, expensive in both money and time.
One problem is probably exemplified by Sun's position; for all of our interest in OFW, I doubt we could get a firmware engineer assigned to such a committee. Our engineers are utterly saturated at this time, and our CEO has announced we should expect layoffs sometime soon. Other companies are probably facing similar strictures at this time. Without some major product's success hanging on the committee's completion, I doubt you'd find enough industry representation at this time.
I do wish you luck in trying to formalize a re-invigoration of the spec.