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Members of the consortium decide how and what work is undertaken through an open, democratic process.
Technial work is happening it the following categories, Web Services, e-Commerce, Security, Law & Government, Supply Chain, Computing Management, Application Focus, Document-Centric, XML Processing, Conformance/Interop and Industry Domains.
Like many bodies producing open standards, OASIS has a patent disclosure policy requiring participants to disclose intent to apply for software patents for technologies under consideration in the standard. While the W3C requires participants to offer royalty-free licenses to anyone using the resulting standard, OASIS asks only for reasonable and non-discriminatory [1] licensing.
Controversially, this licensing allows publication of standards requiring licensing fee payments to patent holders, effectively eliminating the possibility of open source implementations. Further, contributors could initially offer royalty-free use of their patent, later imposing per-unit fees, after the standard becomes accepted.
Supporters of OASIS point out this could occur anyway since an agreement would not be binding on non-participants, discouraging contributions from potential participants. Supporters further argue that IBMThis article is about the International Business Machines Corporation; see IBM (disambiguation) for other uses of this abbreviation. International Business Machines Corporation IBM or colloquially, Big Blue (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since and MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation , headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, is the world's largest software company (with over 50,000 employees in various countries, as of May 2004). Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software shifting standardization efforts from the W3C to OASIS is evidence this is already occurring.
See Also: World Wide Web ConsortiumThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces standards—"recommendations", as they call them—for the World Wide Web. The Consortium is headed by W3C founder Al Vezza and Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of URL (Uniform Resource Lo