December 9th, 2005
Interview with Ecma's Secretarie General
The following is an interview of Jan van den Beld, the Secretarie General of Ecma International. I intereviewed him on December 5th, 2005, just days before Ecma approved Microsoft’s request to establish a technical committee (TC) to ratify the Redmond, WA-based company’s XML-based office productivity file format as an official Ecma standard.
DB: Has the technical committee for Microsoft’s submission already been set up?
JvdB: We will have a technical committee meeting next week, the 15th of december in Brussels, just for this purpose. It will be the first meeting of new TC, it already has a number and it will be 45 (based on 45 years). A formal decision and title of committee will decided on the 8th of December at the General Assembly meeting.
DB: How often does the General Assembly meet?
JvdB: General assembly meetings are held twice per year in June and December. It’s the highest authority of Ecma. The General Assembly can decide on stanards, budget, and leadership. General assembly voting is made by highest class of members.
DB: What are the various levels of membership? How does the structure work?
JvdB: There are five classes of members, and the highest class is called an ordinary member. There are 18 ordinary members at Ecma. The best way to find them is to go to the Web site. Microsoft is there. IBM is there. Several Japanese companies including Toshiba, Fujituse, Hitachi, Sony, Ricoh, Pioneer, and FujiFoto are there. In Europe, Philips, Siemens, Ericcson. In the States, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Sun is not a member. It left Ecma after they couldn’t decide if they wanted to have a standard for Java. It’s not a free choice. you must qualify. You must have certain turnover (annual revenues). There are five categories of membership. Three have special conditions. One of these is the not for profit organization (research institutes, governments, other consortia). They have no membership fees. They get certain rights but not all. Everybody has voting rights at the technical committee (TC) level. At the TC level, each organization has one vote. If you come with 10 guys in the room, you only have one vote on a technical vote. But, the lowest level is not for profit. Then the next category is the small private company. This has a maximum of 5 employees and annual revenues of $5 million per year. Usually startups or very small private companies. The membership fee is 3,500 swiss francs per year. The next one is a better known term, the SME (small medium enterprise). The only qualification is that it must have a turnover (annual revenues) of $75 million. SMEs pay 17,500 swiss francs per year in dues. There’s no initiation fee. If you apply in a certain six month period, invoicing starts at the beginning of the next "semester." Semesters begin on January 1 and July 1. But you get voting rights on a technical leve as soon as you join, even though you haven’t paid yet. Ordinary members, the highest level pays 70,000 francs. Associate Mmembers pay 35,000 francs per year. If you want to be in the management of the association — in other words be involved at both a technical and the management level — getting the rights to decide on budget, who is president, etc, then you must apply for ordinary membership. Theoretically, everyone can apply. but if you were a small private comany, I guess you wouldn’t do that because it is too expensive. If you want to have the rights to chair technical
committees and do not qualify for one of the first three categories, then you can apply for an associate membership.
DB: Sun is not a member. Can it join right now to take part in TC45?
JvdB: Sun can rejoin as an ordinary member or as an associate member whenever it wants. I am still in touch with them and I know [Sun's director of standards] Carl Cargill. We have been good friends for many years but we have not been in touch over TC45. If they have an interest, they are welcome. I would like to have strong players for this new activity.
DB: How is a TC organized?
JvdB: TC’s are organized from the experts from any member (of any membership type). Whoever is a member of Ecma can send any experts to any technical committee. You can send as many guys as you want. The leader of a TC is voted on by the members of the technical committee. The leader must be sponsored or employed by an ordinary member. So that’s one of the rights of an ordinary member. Usually one person leads a techncal committee. If it is a large committee, there can be one or two vice chairman. The chairman is elected for one year and can re-elected for up to a maximum of three consectuive years. The replacement can be another employee of the same ordinary member. Some big committees can be broken up into task groups. Task groups are led by convenors and co-covenors. The process involves an enormous excercise of documenting many things.
DB: Does a TC’s chairperson have veto authority over a vote?
JvdB: The TC must take care that every aspect and every player gets the possibility to say and propose and defend what he or she wants. The chairperson is a neutral person. He can take votes. He has no veto power. For any technical committee including this one on document formats, as soon as someone has indicated they want to be on a TC, they’re on. You don’t have to show up for the meetings, but you could miss a vote if you don’t.
DB: Why does Ecma get this special status that allows it to put something on the ISO’s fast track?
JvdB: The original idea comes from Ecma We proposed it to the ISO/IEC in 1987. It’s a perogrative only given to the normal members of the ISO/IEC. In other words, members that are national bodies. For England, that’s the BSI (British standards institute). In Germany, it’s DIN (Deutsh Institute for Normal). ANSI (the American National Standards Institute) is the American one. To fast track something at the ISO/IEC, the organization must have a certain certain status and the only things that can be fast tracked are published standards. And then it goes into process of the ISO/IEC which normally consists of five stages. But if it’s a fast track proposal, it automatically goes to the highest stage: draft international standard. It is a vote by the national bodies, the members of ISO/IEC for the commitees dealing with this subject. The ISO has more than 200 commitees, but the two organizations (the ISO and the IEC) have one techncial commnitte in common. JTC-1. It’s the single one that is common between ISO/IEC. JTC1 not only has the national body members — known as p-members, but also special "a-liasons. " There are two a-liasons in JTC1. One of them is the ITU-T (the International Telecommunications Union) and the other one is Ecma. These two
a-laiasons have almost same rights as p members but no voting rights. So we have the right to submit a standard for the fast track process. Since 1987, there have come into JTC1 250-300 proposal for the ISO fast strack. 80-90 percent of those have come
from ECMA. Only one of those has ever failed. That gives you some impression of the track record of Ecma.
DB: The OpenDocument Format is already in front of the ISO for ratification. How can the ISO possibly consider another format as a stanard that does the same thing? Wouldn’t that be two standards for the same thing? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a standards?
JvdB: Microsoft’s formats and the OpenDocment Format are not exactly same thing. They’re just alternative approaches to the same problem. There may be a possibility that some is merged into the other. But they’re not 100 percent identical and this is OK. Ecma made all standards for DVD — five competing rewriteable/recordable formats. They all do the same thing. The reason there are five is that there this is a patent war. All of those standards have been fast tracked to the ISO and all been approved without any comments. The ISO cannot decide for one industry group. It must be neutral. it can pick one over the other. There’s no possibility for a standards body to decide it in favor of IBM, Sun, or Microsoft. It’s very possible for the ISO to set both standards. There may be overlap, but it doesn’t matter. For the ISO, it’s impossible to get in the way of patent wars.
DB: But don’ t you think that encourages patent wars?
JvdB: I have never thought so deeply about it (how the pemission of multiple standards encourages patent wars). In a way yes, of course, there are hardly any subjects in hi-tech where no patents are involved. That is one of the big worries about bodies being concerned with patents So, we stay out of it. If you have a patent, you get an unconditional right and what you do with your patent is your business. You can ask "is that good?" Well that’s an interesting question.
DB: Why does Ecma require only a reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) license from patent holders who contribute to Ecma specifications instead of something more openly deployable like royalty-free the way the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) does it or completely unencumbered?
JvdB: Licensing is not an issue of permission, it’s an issue of pragmatism and there is no better way today . The maximum you can get is licensed under RAND conditions. Some specifications, you can get RF. The W3C’s royalty free policy has an immediate effect [on that organization.] Becuase of that policy, only certain subjects are brought to the W3C. The rest are brought to [other consortia] because these companies want to make money on their patents.
DB: Microsoft has said the process of getting Ecma and ISO ratification will take about a year. Since it’s supposed to be a multiparty process, can Microsoft actually say that without knowing what other parties are going to get involved and the extent to which they’ll want to deliberate over the specification?
JvdB: No. Not formally. Also after the technical committee is done, there are still two steps. The specification must be submitted to Ecma’s General assembly for approval as an ECMA standard and then General Assembly approval is also required before [the Ecma standard] can go to the fast track process of the ISO. By publishing a document as an ECMA standard, we meet one of the two requirements. Microsoft cannot say when it that gets published. That’s a decision that gets made by the technical committee. It may take a year. But it’s very dependent on how speedy they work. If they want to have a meeting every week they can do that. But that’s very stressing. There are no limits.
DB: How long have you been with Ecma?
JvdB: As secy general? 15 years. But I’ve been with organizaation since 1961 and will retire at end of next year. I’m 68 years old.
DB: In the time you’ve been here, which of the Ecma standards has taken the shortest amount of time?
JvdB: The fastest TC was the standard for ECMAScript. It made it in four months. They had a meeting every week.
DB: And the longest?
JvdB: That is a diffcult question for me. Certainly not more than three years. Some standards are very complicated and take somes time. The first SCSI standard came from ECMA and took quite some time. Some languages took some time because they are very complicated. The stadard for the binding between C++ and the CLI took almost two years.
DB: Do you have any idea of how long this one will take?
JvdB: The shortest period is probably one one year. That’s fairly likely. That would nicely fall together with the avaialabilty of Office 12. Work, Excel, and Powerpoint will be the only three formats covered in the first round. There are few more lesser known formats for other sorts of Office applications — more for specific applications — and and they have to be covered as well, perhaps after the first document is published. I have no clue how far they are going to define these as XML and then there’s the history. If they want to go back to Office 97 or just Office 2000, I don’t know. At some momeont , but now I’m really guessing, some of the work may be done in a Task Group (a subgroup of the technical committee) to work on older documents and another TG could be responsible for evolution of [of the Ecma standard]. In the first round there will be an enourmous amount of backlog of dealing with the existing formats. These must be covered in the first round at least (as many as possible). The starting part is focusing on Office 12. How much we can do for Office 2000, I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe there’s not enough time. This is what I call an enourmous catch up activity.
DB: What about the voting process. Can it be politicized? Can other companies on the TC try to filibuster or slow it down? For example, IBM or Sun?
JvdB: Yes. They can come with counter proposals and it can delay the process. But this can be resolved by the comittee. It is up to the chairman to says here are these alternatives [to a decision] and call for a simple majority vote. But it can become politicized. For example, in another TC (for another Ecma standard), other companies could be dependent on Microsoft. It’s better
to come with constructive proposals. So, theoretically, yes. We are in a competitive world. We have to permit that there are other solutions.
DB: Must the process wait for one of the General Assemblies two annual meetings before a vote at that level to ratify the standard can take place?
JvdB: No. A postal ballot can be taken.
DB: Has anyone ever complained to you about the process?
JvdB: Take the example of DVD. For a while, there was an arguement over who can use the acronym DVD. It is not really protected. But that dispute bubbled up. There are at least two factions of companies in the DVD world. The +RW and -RW factions. In the early days, you could not write in the acronym "DVD+RW." It required a vote at the General Assembly level. It never comes to me. It all goes to the general assembly. I can try to influence and be a catalyst and say, if you do this, then that can happen.
DB: There’s a conformance proviso in Microsoft’s covenant not to sue. Isn’t that somewhat incompatible with the idea of multiparty stewardship?
JvdB: The first reaction from my side is that we must distinguish the standard from the implementation. And then who is testing whether the conformance claim is correct. That is a good question. In general, everyone can provide a conformance test. That’s a whole industry on its own. But, can Microsoft say you must conform with the Ecma standard? I have no view on this. The only guarantee is that you must be able to get a license from Microsoft on RAND conditions.
DB: What does RAND mean to you?
JvdB: Ecma has never gotten into defining what is RAND. That may sound simplistic. We cannot make any hard statement on this. There are no ways to present this. I am not a lawyer. We just say that you must be able to get a license from the patent holder.
