As expected (CI No 3,175), Sun Microsystems Inc’s attempt to get Java accepted as a standard within the International Standards Organization (ISO), was voted down by the US representatives, the so-called Joint Technical Committee 1 Technical Advisory Group (JTC1 TAG) at its meeting yesterday in Fairfax, Virginia. However, the group actually voted No, with comments, which means that if Sun can address its concerns expressed in the comments, it can re-apply to become a submitter of Publicly Available Specifications (PAS), an honor only previously accorded to not-for-profit organizations. Sun said late yesterday that it had not seen the comments, but said in broad terms they referred to the trademarking of the Java name, future maintenance of the Java standard, and what technologies Sun would submit into the process, which would seem to us to be just about everything. But Sun said its amendment sent to the JTC1 on May 7 dealt with the issue of which technologies Sun was willing to hand over to the process. That statement said Sun was willing to follow ISO policy on intellectual property rights; was willing to negotiate patent licenses under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions; will follow ISO/IEC policy on copyright, as per other standards such as Ethernet and Posix; that the ISO/IEC trademark policy allows it to retain all Java-related trademarks; and finally that it will limit its submissions to the Java language, the Java bytecodes, Java Virtual Machine and the core Java APIs. There are 30 countries voting in all, the US is just the first. Sun says it will spend about a week analyzing the comments and will then respond to the JTC1.
