Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

[Mark Davis <markdavis@ispchannel.com>]

1. SAP and JustSystems are not US companies, and a number of the others -- while based in the US -- are multinational companies in scope, and quite concerned with meeting customer requirements all over the world.

2. There is nothing to stop other companies or organizations from joining as full members, if they are interested in supporting the Unicode standard. The consortium is a non-profit organization. The fees, compared to other consortia, are quite reasonable, and used to finance the development of the standard.

3.  Moreover, the work done via volunteer efforts completely dwarfs what is paid for out of the fees. Many people and organizations have influence over the standard and have made significant contributions without being corporate members.

4. By your criteria, W3C and many other consortia (e.g. the Internet Mail Consortium) are as closed or more; W3C is much more expensive than the UC, for example. ISO  is also closed, since you would have to buy a small country to join.

Are you saying that IETF should not depend on anything that those organizations do?

Mark

Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 07:02:11AM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
> > Keld,
> >
> > You keep saying that the Unicode consortium is "closed", as if constant repetition would make it so. The consortium is open to any organization to join, has liaisons with many standards organizations, and has many contributions from individual experts. It is as open as the W3C and many other consortia, and more open than ISO itself since members do not need to be national bodies. Moreover, we work very closely with ISO in determining character allocation, with a relationship that has been uniquely successful.
> >
> > If you want to become more familiar with the Unicode consortium, I suggest you visit http://www.unicode.org. For a list of the Unicode members, see http://www.unicode.org/unicode/consortium/memblogo.html
>
> I regard Unicode as quite closed, as it costs about USD 12.000 a year to have a say (voting
> rights) in the Consortium. Only big companies can do this. It also shows that only
> about 20 very big US companies have a voting rights in Unicode inc.
>
> Keld