Open and freely available technology standards are a good thing. They
are especially important to developers of free software. Open standards
create wider interoperability and 'freedom' that free software
developers like. Free and open standards are critically linked to free
and open technology. [See
http://consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/may06.php#feature
<http://consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/may06.php#feature> for a recent
article on this]
About 10 years ago, the HTML 2 markup standard was approved by the W3C.
As we all know, HTML as a standard data format has allowed people across
the globe to author billions of documents that can be parsed, indexed,
searched, retrieved and read with all kinds of software. (Do you
Google?) Just this month the International Standards Organization (ISO)
approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard for office file
formats. The ISO approval reinforces the already approved ODF standard
formed by OASIS[1] member companies. The open source project 'Open
Office' implements the ODF file format. For developers on the Open
Office project, the ISO approval means easier adoption of their hard
work by national governments that may require such approved status as a
condition for technology policymaking.
Prediction: In much less than a decade, ODF is going to have an even
greater positive impact on the information society compared with the way
that HTML has over the past 10 years. For starters, ODF opens
'authorship' to anyone who knows how to use a computer/word processor
whereas only a small fraction of 'authors' know how to generate HTML
documents. Suddenly the barrier to authoring just got a lot lower. Of
course today there are so many more people connected to the Internet. I
could go on with this discussion, but the point is that really
groundbreaking positive work is being done by OASIS and other standards
bodies that helps to shape the technical age that we live in.
Want to work on combining open standards and open software? If you
would like to use your skills as an Open Source developer and/or system
administrator, OASIS is looking for you. We have an infrastructure that
runs on LAMP with Debian GNU-Linux. We use open source development
methodologies and tools such as IM, IRC, wikis, SVN and mailing lists.
We run Content Management and other applications on top of Zope, Python,
PHP and Perl. We use MySQL and Apache. All in support of the formation
of some of the most important standards affecting the Internet and
technology today.
http://www.oasis-open.org/jobs/sr-webdeveloper.php
<http://www.oasis-open.org/jobs/sr-webdeveloper.php> (the sysadm
position is not posted yet)
Candidates who can work onsite will be considered preferentially but all
interested are encouraged to apply.
If you have considerable talent and would like to put it to good use,
then please contact greg.rundlett AT oasis-open DOT org.
[1] Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
http://www.oasis-open.org
<http://www.oasis-open.org/jobs/sr-webdeveloper.php>
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