Objections to new charter


The W3C runs a vote on the charter changes and the AC rep from each company enters a position including comments about the draft. 

Sixteen companies supported the charter as is, 3 companies suggested minor changes but were OK with the charter even if no changes were made, and two had formal objections and were not OK with the charter as is. Those two companies were Microsoft and Hookflash that are companies that formed the ORTC community group. The objections are not public so I have tried to summarize the key issues here such that we can help drive to a charter that represents WG consensus. 

I plan to send this email with my summary, followed by an email with comments about my opinion of how to address theses and then proposed text for the charter. I will also send some versions of the charter that are easy to diff so folks can easily see what has changed between the old, new, and various proposals. 



My summary of Microsoft formal objection
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The WG is 3 years behind it's the currently chartered work and should be extend only a few months so that the Team and the AC will be in better position to decide to do this work in some other way that the WebRTC WG. One alternative way would be the ORTC community group. 

Nine months ago the WG had consensus to add the RTPSender/Receiver objects but despite multiple pull requests, that has still not happened. (Note that at the time Microsoft wrote this, that was correct and even though this is in the spec now). This needs to speed up so we want the charter to describe how the editor could use github while ensuring the WG explicitly review and the spec before publishing official Working Drafts. 

The charter should only be extended 2 years.

It should focus on finishing the first generation of the spec WebRTC 1.0 API Recommendation that documents the first generation of the API and should not be extended to do the next version of this API. 

It should not use the word "WebRTC NG" since discussion of the next generation API has been happening in the ORTC community group for 18 months. The community group has as many active members as the WG and the chair and editor do ensure it has consensus behind the drafts it publishes. I will take the liberty of directly quoting from the response as I feel the following is probably the most important point made in the objections "A future charter for “WebRTC NG” standardization must be drafted as a collaboration between the leaders of the WebRTC WG and the ORTC CG and reflect whatever industry consensus exists at that time on how to move to a next generation API."



My summary of the Hookflash formal objection
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It is not OK to re-charter the WG in it's current state. The current "editorial board" is not acceptable and new people should be selected from the ORTC community group and the WG. Hookflash applauds the editors and chairs for their efforts. 

Recharter should be no more than 2 years and remove any next generation API work. Next generation work should only be considered after the ORTC community group has had more real world experience with the ORTC API.

Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2015 20:19:36 UTC