Further details have emerged of what went on at the Joint Technical Committee 1 Technical Advisory Group (JTC1 TAG) in Fairfax, Virginia last week. That was the meeting where representatives of about 30 companies met to forge the US’s response to Sun Microsystems Inc’s application to become a submitter of Publicly Available Specifications, the status that would permit the company to put Java through the ISO standardization process. The vote was for No, with comments; comments that Sun is currently reviewing and to which it is formulating responses. Sun said last week that it considered its amendment to its original application sufficient to deal with the comments, but would return to the issue in order to try to get the submission through. This week IBM Corp, a strong supporter of Sun’s efforts in this area popped up to say that all was far from lost with Sun’s application, indeed it should be looked upon positively. Tom Doucher, IBM’s program manger for network computing technology in the software division said the most significant question that was addressed at the meeting was the first one: that the group had no objection to a single for-profit company becoming a PAS submitter per se. And on the question of the overall verdict, Sun and IBM were among those voting No with comments, because it realized that a straight yes vote was out of the question. Having looked at the comments, that were largely formatted by an ad-hoc committee before last week’s meeting, Sun thought it could address the issues it raised to the committee’s satisfaction. So, rather than waste time trying to thrash out an unattainable yes vote, Sun would go away and re-formulate its application, we are told. There are 30 countries contributing to the ISO effort and the deadline for submissions is July 14. Sun says it will wait to see what the ISO wants it to do. If its wants to wait until all the other votes are in before it responds, it will do so and if the ISO asks Sun to respond immediately, it’s ready to that also. After the July deadline, all comments and votes are rounded up and sent to Sun for its consideration.
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