[ogsa-wg] OGSA-MWS-BOF at GGF14 on Tues June 28, noon-1:30

[Marty Humphrey]

Three alternate answers:

[1] MS has been giving *public* talks (I attended one two weeks ago) in
which they publicly stated that they believed that "everything" would be in
standards bodies within a year. I asked the speaker specifically with regard
to WS-SecureConversation, WS-Trust, and WS-Management and the speaker said
yes. I believe I followed up privately regarding WS-Transfer,
WS-Enumeration, and WS-Eventing, and he said yes. He said that certain
things are out of their control, of course, but that every intention is to
have them these specs in standards bodies by the end of the year. Yes, I
understand that this is an easy statement to attack, but I tend to believe
him (MS realizes that every day these are NOT in a standards body is an
opportunity lost, right?) Yes, I understand that the world is not so simple,
but I tend to believe them.

[2] Given that Don Ferguson and Francisco Curbera of IBM are co-authors of
WS-Eventing, and given that you're employed by IBM, I would turn this around
and ask you to see if you can ask internally to find out some
publicly-disclosable answers, which you could then share with the rest of
the community. 

[3] I've heard IPR issues as being the bugaboo regarding specifications as
opposed to documents ratified by standards bodies. So I'll assume that
you're referring to the IPR issues in the latter half of your email. If not,
and you believe that these specs will never actually make it to a standards
body, then you can ignore the following response (and perhaps focus on my
response #1, above).... 

Regarding IPR, admittedly, IPR has never been something that I've had the
time or interest to deeply understand (I'm an academic, remember?) So your
statement (which I believe to refer to IPR) made me curious. In digging to
try to find the IPR issues/statements for WSRF and WS-Eventing (for
example), I'm even more confused. 

On one hand, here's the statement on the WS-Eventing spec: 

"BEA, Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and TIBCO (collectively, the
"Authors") each agree to grant you a license, under royalty-free and
otherwise reasonable, non-discriminatory terms and conditions, to their
respective essential patent claims that they deem necessary to implement the
Specification." 

This seems pretty clear (and desirable for our community, right?) So what's
the issue? That it might change before being submitted to a standards body?
Please help me understand.

I'm trying to figure out the comparable statement with regard to, say,
WS-Resource Property, it doesn't seem to be as clear. The spec itself
doesn't seem to say anything directly one way or the other, except to say in
Appendix E ("OASIS takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
intellectual property or any other rights that might be claimed to pertain
to the implementation or use of the technology described in this
document....") On page 2, the spec *does* say "For information on whether
any patents have been disclosed that may be essential to implementing this
specification, and any offers of patent licensing terms, please refer to the
Intellectual Property Rights section of WSRF TC Web page". This web page
says that this TC operates under something called the "Legacy IPR Policy",
which seems to be a very generic statement (nothing specific to WSRF -- just
"no confidentiality requirements on contributions", "contributors must
disclose known patents"). But nothing that I can find about royalty-free.
Perhaps I'm missing it. 

So, can you tell me why the WS-Eventing is so bad compared to WSRF? As we
all know, it's not like "because it's in OASIS, it's royalty-free", right? 

Thanks for clearing this up for me,
Marty

Marty Humphrey
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Virginia



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Maguire [mailto:tmaguire at us.ibm.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 2:44 PM
> To: Marty Humphrey
> Cc: 'Ogsa-Wg'; owner-ogsa-wg at ggf.org
> Subject: RE: [ogsa-wg] OGSA-MWS-BOF at GGF14 on Tues June 28, noon-1:30
> 
> So to be precise, with regard to status, you have no idea when or if those
> specifications will be submitted to an SDO for standardization.  Further
> you have no way of knowing when or if those specifications will be
> submitted to an SDO, given that there are most likely contractual
> obligations between the current set of authors to which you would never be
> privy and if you were would be precluded from disclosing.
> 
> Tom
> 
> Frey’s Law: “Every 5 years the number of architecture components double
> and
> the ability to comprehend them halves”
> 
> 
> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when
> there is nothing left to take away.   – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
> 
> 
> T o m   M a g u i r e
> 
> 
> STSM, On Demand Architecture
> 
> 
> Poughkeepsie, NY  12601
> 
> owner-ogsa-wg at ggf.org wrote on 06/22/2005 07:45:03 AM:
> 
> >
> > > 1.  Please could you clarify the status of WS-Transfer, WS-Eventing
> and
> > > WS-Enumeration in the terms of the OGSA Profile template?  I.e. have
> they
> > > been submitted to an SDO, are they draft or evolving, etc.?
> >
> > As you know, there is a 4-step process by which these specs will become
> > standards: [1] "Develop", in which the spec is published; [2] "Broader
> > Participation", in which there are feedback and interop workshops
> (resulting
> > in possibly revising and republishing the specs); [3] "Standardization",
> in
> > which the specs are submitted to a standardization body, which then can
> > modify the spec as well and eventually ratify; [4] "Profiles", in which
> a
> > separate document shows how to *combine* specs, generally resulting in a
> > "subsetting" of the original specs.
> >
> > On Dec 1, 2004, Intel hosted a "feedback" workshop (step [2]), above,
> for
> > WS-Enumeration and WS-Transfer. The companies attending the workshop
> > included AMD, Computer Associates, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, SAP,
> > Sharp, Sonic, Sun, veritas, et. al. Although I can't entirely confirm
> this,
> > it looks like the following companies brought implementations of
> > WS-Enumeration/WS-Transfer to this workshop: Microsoft, Dell, Intel,
> NetIQ,
> > Sun, and WebMethods.
> >
> > On Feb 19, 2004, Tibco hosted a "feedback" workshop for WS-Eventing.
> > Attendees included Microsoft, BEA, IBM, NEC, Sonic, etc. On April 15,
> 2004,
> > Microsoft hosted an "interop" workshop on WS-Eventing ("The outcome of
> the
> > workshop was the demonstration of interoperability among all the 7
> > implementations." The seven implementations were from BEA, Canon, Epson,
> > Microsoft, Ricoh, Sonic, and Systinet.) It looks like there will be
> another
> > WS-Eventing workshop, although the date/time have not been announced.
> >
> > The most recent specs are:
> >
> > -- WS-Eventing: Aug 2004 (Authors: IBM, BEA, Computer Associates,
> Microsoft,
> > Sun, and Tibco).  This new version modifies the original version (Jan
> 2004,
> > I believe) to reflect the workshops.
> >
> > -- WS-Enumeration: Sept 2004 (Authors: Systinet, Microsoft, Sonic, BEA,
> > Computer Associates). This is the first version of the spec.
> >
> > -- WS-Transfer: Sept 2004 (Authors: Systinet, Microsoft, Sonic, BEA,
> > Computer Associates). This is the first version of the spec.
> >
> > There's an interesting graphic that shows some of the progress from
> > Microsoft's perspective here:
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/graphics/workshop-timeline.gif
> (this
> > is taken from
> > http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/community/workshops/default.aspx)
> >
> >
> > > 2.  I can see that WS-Transfer specifies some of the functionality of
> WSRF
> > > and WS-Eventing is largely equivalent to WS-BaseNotification, but what
> has
> > > WS-Enumeration to do with this?  From a brief reading, it seems to
> specify
> > > functionality that is independent of either stack.
> >
> > I can see this point -- in our initial designs and experimentation with
> > WS-Transfer and WS-Eventing, we chose to not utilize WS-Enumeration. But
> we
> > are increasingly considering WS-Enumeration as an important part of the
> > story.
> >
> > From Felipe Cabrera of Microsoft: "Many scenarios require data exchange
> > using more than just a single request/response message pair. Types of
> > applications that require these longer data exchanges include database
> > queries, data streaming, the traversal of information such as
> namespaces,
> > and enumerating lists. Enumeration, in particular, is achieved through
> > establishing a session between the data source and the requestor. This
> > session is established using the Enumerate operation, which provides an
> > enumeration context that is then used in subsequent operations.
> Successive
> > messages within the session transport the collection of elements being
> > retrieved. No assumptions are made on the approach used by the service
> to
> > organize the items that will be produced. What is expected is that under
> > normal processing circumstances, the enumeration will produce all the
> > underlying data before the end of the session.... In its simplest form,
> > WS-Enumeration defines a single operation, Pull, which allows a data
> source,
> > in the context of a specific enumeration, to produce a sequence of XML
> > elements in the body of a SOAP message.... Three more request/response
> > operations are defined in WS-Enumeration: Renew, GetStatus, and
> Release....
> > State information regarding the progress of the iteration can be
> maintained
> > between requests by either the data source or the consuming service....
> In
> > addition to enumerating the data entities present in a Web service, it
> is
> > convenient to be able to perform several basic operations on them. These
> > operations are introduced in the WS-Transfer operation."
> >
> > I hope this helps,
> > Marty
> >
> > Marty Humphrey
> > Assistant Professor
> > Department of Computer Science
> > University of Virginia
> >
> >
> >