Stop WSDM

Over at OASIS, they’re working on YAWSS (Yet Another Web-Services Spec) called WSDM. The committee decided they were done and asked for an OASIS-wide vote; the result was 67 yes, 7 no. Interestingly, the 7 “No” votes weren’t about the substance of WSDM, they were about the fact that it has dependencies on all sorts of other WS-bric-a-brac that isn’t finalized yet, including a W3C Submission and a bunch of other committee drafts. The committee pondered this and decided to go ahead and make it a standard anyhow. I tried to go and read WSDM and it made my head hurt, severely; it’s gnarly and huge and complicated and seems to depend on lots of other gnarly and huge and complicated things. So, anyone who wants to implement this is going to have to make a major investment, and since a lot of the relevant specs are unstable, you just know some part of that investment is going to get thrown on the trash-heap. Interoperability? Ha. Ha. Ha. This sucks. I don’t want to be an absolutist here; some organizations, like IETF, totally forbid this kind of thing while others, like ISO, allow them in a kind of controlled way. But in this particular case, what they’re trying to do is deeply wrong and the OASIS management needs to find a way to stomp on it if they want to retain any credibility. For other commentary, start here. [Disclosure: I don’t understand WSDM and I don’t even understand the problem it’s trying to solve and while Sun was one of the “No” voters, it was strictly on the dependencies issue, and I don’t know whether we, corporately, are as irritated as I am individually and I don’t know whether we, corporately, actually care about this technology and if we do, whether we like it or not.]