[MPEG-OTSPEC] near-term OT spec work

[Caleb Maclennan]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 7:24 AM Levantovsky, Vladimir...
> On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 10:27 PM fantasai wrote...
>> I think the biggest problem here is that there is no public draft that you can
>> all work together on. All you have is Peter's work on the MSOT spec. If you
>> had a public working draft of OFF, it would allow others to review and draft
>> text and have a shared understanding of the current state of the AHG's
>> proposed updates to the OFF specification.
>>
>> In the absence of such a shared draft, the best this community can do is work
>> off Peter's MSOT draft. I don't think this is an ideal solution, but until
>> there is a public working draft of OFF, it is the best one you have.
>
> While I agree that we do not have a _shared_ public working draft of OFF
> available for ongoing development (the way the work is done in W3C), I do
> not agree that it precludes us from having a shared understanding of the
> current state of proposed updates. The current, most recent text of the OFF
> standard is publicly available free of charge, and anyone in the community
> (not just Peter) can do the work using current OFF text as a base – this is
> really not much different than Peter doing his work off MSOT draft. It may
> not be as nice and convenient as having the shared public draft available
> {and it’s definitely not much fun), but it is doable.

I disagree, what most of us can do is very different than what Peter can do.
Most of us cannot work on an actual copy of the OFF‌ spec in public, because
while the current PDF version may be freely available none of the rest of us
are allowed to post a copy of it in public anywhere that we could work on
collaboratively. Peter working on the MSOT version of the spec is completely
different, as an MS representative he has access to the source of that spec,
editorial license to change it, and no issue with the trademark the
spec is under.
Meanwhile even his work on editing that spec is not public! We got to see
comments he made to the issue tracker about changes including some snippets
from the latest draft as he worked on it, but the draft itself was not a public
process. I realize you were not alleging it was a public draft, but you are
suggesting that everybody has equal opportunities at the table here. What
I disagree about is the suggestion that MS's work on MSOT (for which they hold
the trademark and can post publicly (or not) at their own discretion
is different
than the situation for the rest of in regard to OFF‌ drafts.

Caleb