I shall not restate the issue here- If you need to get some context around what I’m about to rant about take a look at this post from Rod and the comments around it.

I was one of the 20 or so attendees at a standards New Zealand meeting to discuss the vote by New Zealand to JTC1 on the ratification of ECMA 376 as an ISO standard.

I’m going to try and quickly remember who was there.

Pat Rossiter from Hyperion Management Services

Tom Robinson from Kowhai Computing

Colin Jackson from Google New Zealand (it.gen.nz is Colin’s personal site, he was there either as a contractor or volunteer for Google. I think he was also one of the Technical Advisors to the Government Agencies working group)

Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia

Richard Donaldson and Liz (last name forgotten) from the New Zealand Computer Society

Three people from IBM (one from Canada, two from NZ)

Three people from Microsoft (one from NZ, one from US, one from Singapore)

Matthew Cruickshank, Don Christie and one other person (who I don’t think said anything the entire time- he was in charge of stopping Matthew’s laptop going into power save mode while he gave a  presentation though which was useful) from the NZ Open Source Society

Four people from The ‘New Zealand Government Agencies’.

Myself J representing Intergen

Peter Lambrechsten from Novell (although Peter told me on Friday that he wasn’t actually representing Novell views but rather his own... not quite sure what all that was about really...)

There were also plenty of people there from Standards NZ.

The meeting was very well behaved and really not the sort of OSS vs Microsoft death match that you’d think it might have turned into.

It started out with some introductions from the COO of Standards and then an introduction to the whole ISO/IEC JTC1 structure by Nelson Proctor of standards. I asked Nelson if he could explain the relationship between ECMA and JTC1 and he ended up going on a bit of a diatribe about how ECMA is not a ‘real’ standards body.... which wasn’t particularly useful. What I was really trying to have explained was the details around the ECMA liaison with JTC1 and thus the Fast Track process. I probably should have pushed back a bit harder but it was the first question of the day.....

We then kicked of proceedings proper with a discussion of 5 questions (3 on Thu and 2 on Fri) + a ‘What is good for NZ Inc’ session on Friday afternoon.

The questions were those from the Free Software Foundation here (my Foxit PDF Reader is failing on cut and paste so I can’t paste the actual Standards NZ ones). Basically of the Free Software Foundation questions we covered verbatim #1, #2, #3, #4, #6. The question of Dual Standards, #5, was covered several times through the other questions.

The process for each question was basically Microsoft and IBM got to have a say and then it was basically a roundtable of questions and comments. This ranged from detailed discussion around technical points to simply reading out a prepared statement.

Ken Matheson presented for IBM and Gray Knowlton for Microsoft.

I’m going to post on each of the questions separately as I get time over the next couple of days- I’m feeling a bit crook with a cold and cut my days skiing at Cadrona very short @ about 1:30pm because I was feeling very broken.