Middleware Matters

A few years ago when I spoke about Web Services at conferences, I would explain how the industry was uniquely united behind developing common Web Services standards, as opposed to the technology wars and standards wars that plagued earlier approaches. Unfortunately, this is no longer true.

Jon Udell talks about the mess of Web Services standards that confront us today. Indeed, it is a mess. What's worse, though, is that these are not standards, but are instead "proprietary standards" -- specifications written to sort of look like standards without actually being real standards.

I haven't read all the specs that Jon mentions, but the ones I have read need a lot of work if they're going to be actual standards. The difference in quality between a specification submitted for standardization and the resulting standard is typically enormous, as a good standardization process will always uncover and correct huge holes, ambiguities, contradictions, and poorly-explained features.

But are these specs actually ever going to be standards? When Steve Mills of IBM and Bill Gates publicly touted these specs last September, they couldn't tell us if or when these specs would be standardized.

The problem with these "proprietary standards" is that they are closed to input. And even for the chosen few allowed to provide input, the authoring companies completely reserve the right to use or ignore their comments and criticisms of the specs. Let's face it -- this is because the companies publishing the specs are busy implementing them, and they essentially refuse to take comments that would require any painful refactoring or rewriting of their implementations.

At best, these proprietary standards represent a malevolent dictatorship. These specs aren't good for the industry because they have too many holes, they do not represent input on a level playing field from the best and brightest, and they are not the result of consensus building. They benefit only those companies that publish them, especially given that those companies can change them at will anytime they like, breaking customers and competitors alike. They are simply the proprietary blueprints of proprietary products, with heavy intellectual property (IP) rights attached, and published in a manner that, while appearing open, is simply a poorly disguised attempt to make the publishing companies look like they're industry- and customer-friendly.

Some of the companies producing these specs have stated in the past that creating real standards takes too long or is too much work. In some cases, they're right; I've done my time in standards work, and it can be difficult. That's generally because writing a good standard is exceptionally hard work. But if they're unwilling to submit their specs to real standards bodies, perhaps a better approach than the current malevolent dictatorship model would be an open benevolent dictatorship model, where the specifications have no stifling intellectual property rights attached, but instead are essentially open source. With this approach, each spec would be put into the public domain, free of IP issues and free for anyone to use, and official changes to the spec would be controlled by a small group of individuals whose primary motives are driven not by a single company's architecture or a single company's market share, but by the desire to ensure broad adoption and application of the spec. This model obviously follows how successful open source software projects are developed and maintained.

These proprietary standards are real threats to the viability of the Web Services market. With unified open standards, the sky's the limit, with plenty of market to go around for everyone. With these proprietary standards, however, we're no better off than we are without any standards whatsoever.