The Open Web Foundation - Why Do It?

So i’ve not been involved in the newly launched Open Web Foundation but i have been following along as various folks i know worked on OpenID and OAuth. Is it a great idea, or yet another structure? I’m not sure.

Here’s my understanding. Most standards traditionally have been heavy vendor driven processes. Even when you don’t need $$$ or to be a big company to participate, you do need to have the resources to fly around the world to the meetings, like IETF. It’s painful and nasty.

There are a series of standards which are created using more open source / hacker / collaborative ways which are emerging from code, like extracting a framework from your application, you extract the standard from your work and best practices. It’s easy, lightweight, great, works.

Some of these extracted open sourcey standards get picked up and big companies want to start implementing them. This is great, just look at how OAuth has gotten adopted all over the place.

But there is a problem, these big companies have lawyers and their lawyers are both stupid and evil. Lawyers created the stupid and evil system of intellectual property. These lawyers all seem to have adopted a particularly brain dead view of what my happens with related to participation and patents and intellectual property rights.

They think that unless you have a magic paragraph which says you don’t grant patents and intellectual property rights just by participating in a standards process, or even USING or READING a standard, the big corps loose their rights to enforce their patents.

Yes it’s super stupid, but that’s what you get when you let lawyers run your world.

So the Open Web Foundation is about creating something which will shut the lawyers up and let these bottom up, extracting standards folks still work without having to die the death of a thousand meetings with legal.