OASIS individual memberships (was Will OASIS matter? )

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 10:56 AM 7/9/99 -0700, Andrew Layman wrote:
>Adding to what David said, W3C management have made it clear that the W3C is
>not going to generally be in the position of endorsing domain-specific DTDs
>or schemas.  This means that DTDs and schemas are going to need other
>development and cataloging services, e.g. Oasis and BizTalk.

Which is great and important and all, but doesn't really make me excited
about spending $250 to join the organization.  (It should speak more toward
large companies spending $100,000 to support xml.org.)

I guess my concern in general comes down to a basic problem: will spending
$250 on an individual OASIS membership actually get me $250 worth of
benefit?  

I doubt my $250 would push my schemas ahead of anyone else's in the
repository, and while I'd be interested in contributing to the structure of
that repository, I'm not sure that paying for the privilege in order to
donate my time presents any sort of ROI, as opposed to $250 spent on rent.

I'm (very) glad that OASIS is willing to accept individual members on some
level, but I still don't see why it makes sense for those members.  If it
would help me market my books or consulting in some way, it might be
useful, but I don't see anything like that in the material presented on the
site.

David Megginson wrote:
>It's hard to say what benefits might develop.

With a crowd of already-paid up organizational members in there, it's hard
to justify a speculative investment with no likely gain besides a tiny bit
of seniority over people who come to the party even later.

I'm really hoping there are real benefits here someplace...

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer / Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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