By William Fellows
Following Sun Microsystems Inc’s admission that it will not be submitting Java to ISO’s PAS process for international standardization, the company is examining whether one of its old friends, ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association, would be more accommodating to its requirements. ECMA secretary general Jan van den Beld told ComputerWire that ECMA would certainly appreciate a Java standardization project if that were to be proposed by Sun. He said contacts with Sun on Java are going on but there is no formal agreement with Sun as of today.
Sun’s problem with ISO – and the PAS publicly available specification process to which it was to have submitted the Java 2 specification – is that rule changes ISO has made to PAS, plus guidelines ISO has issued mean Sun would have to give up ultimate control of the future development and maintenance of the specification to ISO’s membership. Sun says Microsoft Corp also spent heavily trying to step on its PAS application. Microsoft has always claimed that it is inappropriate for Sun or any other for-profit concern to be a PAS submitter, a process usually reserved for other trade standards groups.
Whether Sun could retain control over Java’s future through ECMA standardization isn’t clear. Van den Beld said the discussion on control of a standard is somewhat theoretical. I hardly can believe that a good third party proposal would not be acceptable to a company like Sun (and others as well, speaking more in general) for inclusion in the standard which is by definition a publicly controlled document. This does not imply that a standard should be easily allowed to deviate from the real world and its requirements, or become a theoretical document that is no longer used in practice. An industry association like ECMA is always carefully watching how the existent customer base can be best protected.
Ironically, Sun had previously evaluated ECMA when it was examining potential routes for de jure Java standardization. As ECMA standards are subsequently passed along to ISO for ratification as international standards, it could be seen as a backdoor way for Sun to get what it wants. However, Microsoft was able to shoot down a previous Sun standards initiative sponsored by ECMA. Several years ago the European body championed Sun’s Public Windows Interface to put a specification for Windows application programming interfaces into the public domain, and it is now an ECMA standard. Microsoft was able to pull the rug from under it when it went to ISO for ratification. Nevertheless ISO has rubber-stamped ECMAScript, an enhanced version of JavaScript which ECMA sponsored, just two years after the first meetings on a Java scripting language were held. Sun’s corporate director of standards is Carl Cargill, who returned to Sun some months ago after stint at Netscape Communications Corp.
Microsoft told ComputerWire that in its belief ECMA is pretty desperate for relevance with a lot of the interesting standards work migrating to W3C/IETF around the internet or bypassing traditional standards bodies altogether via open source. As for Javasoft president Alan Baratz laying part of the blame for the failure of its PAS submission on money Microsoft dropped to influence JTC1, the ISO committee responsible for Java, Redmond says it is a smokescreen to distract from the fact that Sun has been unsuccessful in convincing JTC 1 to rubberstamp their proprietary process.
Some at ISO are sure to view Sun’s abandonment of PAS as a good thing. It will give ISO the option of standardizing Java – without the trademarked name – at its own pace with equal participation by all parties. The same process it used to standardize C, C++, Fortran and other computer languages. It’s a slow and painstaking process, but it works, admitted a Java committee member. Others believe that Sun simply didn’t get what ISO wanted first time round (when it applied for PAS status) which means years lost at getting a standard put in place.
Sun’s biggest Java ally, IBM Corp hadn’t got back to us in an official capacity regarding the news, but IBM has always maintained it wanted Java to go through ISO and the Sun taken out of Java. It said all of its Java resources are currently focused on a forthcoming campaign. Must be a big deal.
