Bristling at rejection?
One influential W3C member said the dust-up over choreography--and the politics that delayed the working group's formation--had less to do with the actual technology problems than with lingering resentment on Microsoft and IBM's part over the W3C's rejection last year of a RAND exception.
"There was a community that wanted to take specifications in this space to groups other than W3C," said the W3C member. "The reason they want to do that is unrelated to anything to do with Web services or choreography. It's basically an in-your-face response to the displeasure with the work going on with respect to intellectual property."
Among companies that have signed on to the W3C's new effort, or that plan to, impatience is building for the BPEL4WS troika to make up its mind.
"Microsoft, IBM and BEA have been saying for quite a long time that they haven't decided to what standards organization they're going to bring this, and our position is one of puzzlement," said Eduardo Gutentag, a senior staff engineer at Sun and a W3C representative. "How long does it take to decide this sort of thing?" Gutentag said that the worst-case scenario would be if the BPEL4WS co-authors opted not to bring the technology to a standards group at all.
But he also urged them not to bring it to OASIS or another smaller group, warning that such placement would result in confusion between the different standardization efforts.
Oracle, which for months has been trying to promote a W3C-sponsored solution to the choreography problem, and whose W3C representative will be the new working group's co-chair, said the squabbling threatened the whole Web services industry.
"In this particular case we are trying to be a compromise maker, a peacemaker, but it's not like we're doing it because we're good and they're bad," said Don Deutsche, Oracle's vice president for standards strategy. "It's a self-serving activity, because the industry will not be well served by a fragmentation of these activities."
Deutsche acknowledged the political difficulties standing in the way of a widely accepted standard, but said he thought one would ultimately emerge.
"If others are hell-bent on causing confusion in the marketplace, there's not much we can do," Deutsche said. "But I'm optimistic that sanity will prevail and people will recognize that it's in their provincial corporate interests, as well as those of the industry at large, that this be done right once and for all."
Martin LaMonica contributed to this report.
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