Steve responds to my comments on one of his previous postings regarding WS-*, and he makes some good arguments. I have absolutely no beef with Steve, either, and agree with much of what he says in general. Still, I do have to comment on some of his responses.
First, he takes issue with my suggestion of adding a WS-Architecture spec, saying it's kind of ambiguous to say, "Let's stop adding to WS-* until we can add WS-Architecture." I can see his point, and others raised the same issue to me, but keep in mind that WS-Architecture is more of a meta-spec -- it doesn't have to add new features. It only needs to make sense of what's already there. Like Steve, I also like Paul Brown's idea of producing a detailed dependency graph between the specs, but I think some good descriptive prose is also required. In any event, I hope that if someone tackles WS-Arch, the result will be higher quality than this.
He also rightly questions my implication that only standards bodies can produce viable standards. I don't believe that a standards body is automatically some sort of magical producer of goodness; in fact, I personally can't stand working on standards. However, in the end I grit my teeth and work on standards because they're important to customers. There's absolutely no guarantee that what comes out of a standards process will be viable. With respect to WS-*, however, we've already seen what the current approach is producing, and many agree it could be much better.
Regarding the workshops, while it's true that anyone may show up like Steve says, the authors ultimately reserve the right to decide whether someone's feedback affects the spec. The playing field is thus extremely far from level. While standards processes also lack a truly level playing field, it's typically much more level than that of these "open" workshops.
Steve also hints that we should just let the big players run with what they're already doing and guide the industry to the right place. In my experience, that's exactly wrong. It's the small players that get you to the right place. Let's go back to CORBA. Despite their leadership in producing the specs, none of the big players ever succeeded with CORBA, because ultimately all they ever tried to do was push CORBA as a thin layer over their own platforms, rather than really think things through from the customer perspective. IONA and other small players, meanwhile, took quick ownership of the CORBA market and never relinquished it, because they realized that the strength of CORBA is about going across systems and across platforms. in the 90s I worked for both a large CORBA player (HP) and a small one (IONA), so I experienced it all from both sides of the fence. Web services shares the same cross-system cross-platform strength of CORBA, and yet here we are a decade later and the big guys are once again just pushing their platforms. This time around, though, they learned not to settle the standards too quickly, so as to keep the small players as followers and avoid letting them eat their lunch again. That might work in the short term, but in the end it's a game that nobody wins, especially the customer.