Technical aspects
Technical aspects (Glenn)
• Which organizations are/will be influential in software development?
When looking somewhat deeper in which organizations are active in software development and specifically open source development, some organizations clearly standout.
o OMG, This organization is very influential at the moment, this because object orientated modeling is widely used.
o W3C, And organization known for its participation in web standards. This organization played a massive role setting up the internet what it is today.
o IETF, The Internet Engineering Task Force is charged with developing and promoting Internet standards. It has a lot of active members and plays an important role for future developments.
o OASIS, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards.
o OSSI, The Open Source Software Institute is a non-profit organization comprised of corporate, government and academic representatives whose mission is to promote the development and implementation of open-source software solutions.
o IEEE, a well known organization, not only important in computer standards. They are not directly influential in the software standards, but they are well know, and with there power, they can make or break an up and coming standard.
o ISO, Like IEEE, but even broader in its industry’s, they are an organization that control and monitor new standards.
• What are the current standards and what will be the future standards?
MDA, The basic idea is that the system functionality is defined as a platform-independent model, using an appropriate specification language and then translated to one or more platform-specific models for the actual implementation. This Standard is not yet widely used, but has been designed with the future in mind as software becomes more complex and will need to run on multiple platforms.
XML, this standard is already being used somewhat, but it has been designed for much more than it is used at the moment. It has been designed for multi platforms with multiple communications protocols. It is definitely a standard for the coming short term future.
UML, at the moment very popular standard, but will need to evole is it would want to survive in the future.
• Will there ever be a universal open source standard?
Open source community’s are coming together trying to form groups to get more efficiency and standarzation. But making groups and organizing everything so nice stands in contrast to the whole idea of open source, in which freedom plays such an important role.