Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
I think WS-I has serious credibility problems, especially since it came out that Microsoft's participation was conditional on Sun being excluded from a major role in the organization. To quote from a Bill Gates memo in reference to WS-I which was made public during the antitrust trial (as reported in http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t288-s2110205,00.html, for one source): "I can live with this if we have the positioning clearly in our favour. In particular, Sun not being one of the movers/announcers/founding members." I'm sure that, as a participant in WS-I, you're familiar with these issues, Anne. This credibility problem is certainly going to influence how WS-I proposals are treated by the industry.WS-I has just published its Basic Profile draft, which only supports document-style. Pretty much every SOAP vendor is involved with WS-I, so it won't be long before all SOAP implementations generate document style by default.
If Sun becomes a full coequal participant in the WS-I organization it'll go a long way toward establishing WS-I as a bona fide forum for supporting interoperability. Given Sun's ownership of Java and control over Java standards it's hard to take an organization that excludes Sun seriously on these issues.
- Dennis
