🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <SES.92Sep26213956@cmns-sun.think.com> 
ses@cmns-sun.think.com (Simon Edward Spero) writes:

>might be worth a try is setting up a 'free OSI foundation': under EC
>law, an interface specification cannot be copyrighted; it would be
>entirely legal to take a copy of the OSI standards, and rewrite the
>text in a form that would not be owned by the ISO. Whilst great care

IMHO, Rewriting in any significantly different form, in a different
language (such as some other formal language) etc. might just consume
so much effort that it would not not be affordable, unless pooling of
resources via USENET happens. And that is not easy to organise.

It takes so much time and effort to just wade thru the stuff, so it
stands to reason that paraphrasing it in some other tongue would take
just as much time, and would  have to go thru some years of draft and
approval to make sure it means the same thing as the original.

What could be done is to list out, as a commentary (thus making the
copyright case easy to handle) the differences (from a detailed
implementation point of view) between the corresponding CCITT and
ISO documents. Those docs that have no CCITT equivalent alone would
need writing, and even there some other more public-accessible
versions (eg. IEEE 802.3) would be available.

Such a compilations of "diffs", as it were, might concievably
serve the same ends.

[Note: most CCITT docs are on-line already(one way of the other ;-).]

>The standards which would benefit most from this, judging from the requests
>sent to this group, are ASN.1 and the BER. Anybody think this is worth a 
>crack?

   I am not aware of any significant diffs (besides a small one about
object ids, and the EXTENSIONS macro) between ISO and CCITT versions
of BER. Would not X.208, X.209 do very well ?

-- shrikumar ( shri@legato.cs.umass.edu, shrikumar@cs.umass.edu,
               shri@iucaa.ernet.in )