Via James Governor, a link to an IDC report that attempts to compare the “openness” of ten standards bodies: CEN, Ecma, ETSI, IETF, ISO, ITU, NIST, OASIS, OMG, and W3C. The report is 92 pages long, which is 91 more than I really want to read on this topic. I skimmed the report until I got to the “concluding remarks” at the end. The bottom line:
“However, there are differences between standard setting organizations in terms of ‘openness’ and certainly in terms of how ‘openness’ is implemented. It can be difficult to make a distinction of which form of ‘openness’ is the most appropriate.”
Sure, but after 92 pages maybe the author could at least propose some useful way to organize the problem rather than just making a laundry list of possible interpretations of “openness”.
Still, if you are in the business of running (or selecting) standards organizations it might be worth your time to read this report.
Bad news for DMTF: you are not important enough to be included. Good news for DMTF: your lack of transparency is not exposed by this report.