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IBM Announces New Policy on Standards - Updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

IBM has just announced a new corporate policy regarding its "behavior when helping to create open technical standards". Here's a paragraph you'll like:

IBM's new standards policy promotes simplified and consistent intellectual property practices, and emphasizes that all stakeholders, including the open source community and those in growth markets, should have equal footing as they participate in the standards process.

That would be refreshing, indeed. I think this means we will not ever again see another OOXML-like parody of a standards process. Here's why. One tenet of IBM's new policy is the following:

Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.

Here's another goody:

Advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants, protected from undue influence.

There will be a summit meeting of experts in the field from around the world, by invitation, in November under Yale's auspices to discuss recommendations for improving standards setting. What hath Microsoft wrought! Well, they don't say that. I'm letting you hear my inner thoughts. If you have any ideas that you hope the experts will consider, now is the time to speak, right now, right here.

Full post as published by Groklaw on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).