Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 11:26:14AM -0700, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> Keld,
> 
> > 
> > On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 05:55:52PM +0200, Antoine Leca wrote:
> > > Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I regard Unicode as quite closed, as it costs about USD 12.000 a year to
> > > > have a say (voting rights) in the Consortium.
> > > 
> > > ... and about EUR 600 for an individual to join (as a "specialist";
> > 
> > And then you have no vote over the standard. That is no membership.
> > That kind of arrangement is actually forbidden if it was in Denmark.
> > (No membership without voting rights).
> > 
> 
> Please do not carry on about things that you apparently have no
> knowledge about. The Unicode Consortium, by its bylaws, has a single
> class of membership. Those "members" are the voting members of the
> Consortium, and their voting rights are spelled out in the bylaws
> explicitly, as they should be. Those voting rights constitute the
> right to vote for the Board of Directors of the Consortium. And that
> right is regularly exercised by the members at the annual meeting
> of the members of the Consortium.

I see.

> All other membership classes are creations of the Officers of the
> Consortium (appointed by the Board of Directors), in order to broaden
> participation in the Consortium's business (which by its bylaws is
> the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard) to organizations
> and people who cannot afford the $12,000 annual fee to be official,
> de jure, full members of the Consortium. Those membership classes
> were created to open the Consortium to that participation, and to bring
> more experts and impacted organizations to the table to have a say in
> the development, maintenance, and promotion of the standard.

Why are you then calling these membership classes for "membership"
if they are not members? That is misleading and confusing.

And it still means that

> Voting on technical issues regarding the Unicode Standard is the
> province of the Unicode Technical Committee, which is run by a set
> of rules developed by the Officers of the Consortium. Those technical
> votes and decisions by the UTC are *distinct* from membership votes
> run according to the bylaws. The technical business of the Consortium
> is delegated to the Unicode Technical Committee, with the full approval
> of the Board of Directors of the Unicode Consortium, who bear the
> ultimate responsibility for how the Consortium conducts its business.

I have seen the membership list of the UTC, it is not very different
in nature from the UI membership. So what is the difference?
> 
> Your implication that the Unicode Consortium is running by procedures
> that don't pass your sniff test for legality is particularly odious.
> The Consortium is a registered non-profit corporation, operating in
> accordance with the relevant laws in the State of California, with
> bylaws fully reviewed by legal counsel, and with a Board of Directors
> fully conversant in how corporations are run.

I have never doubted that Unicode Inc. is a proper organization.
So is Microsoft, Sun, W3C and others trying to set their standards thru.
And Unicode Inc. is in practice not an open standardization organization
due to the high membership fees there are to get voting rights
in the organization. It is an organization of a number of big firms
trying to advance their "standard" worldwide.

Kind regards
Keld