# (r.vasudevan 19) XFN Specification

Petr Janecek (petja@xopen.co.uk)
Tue, 27 Sep 94 09:28:29 +0100

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    Message-Id: <9409270835.AA21272@xopen.co.uk>

    Date: Tue, 27 Sep 94 09:28:29 +0100

    From: Petr Janecek <petja@xopen.co.uk>

    To: r.vasudevan@xopen.co.uk

    Subject: (r.vasudevan 19) XFN Specification

Dear Vasu,

thank you for copying me on your mail regarding availability of the X/Open
Federated Naming specification.

I have not seen the previous "emotional" discussion and thus fail to
understand what the real problem is. For what purpose is the specification
source needed ? Nobody has approached us about this. Does someone wish to
avoid having to type in the 48 pages of headers and IDL files given in
Chapter 7 and Appendix A ? That would be a one-off job that would not take
a typist a day. Or is it a question of wishing to purchase multiple copies
of the spec for developers ? There are volume discounts available. Or does
someone wish to reproduce the text in documentation of a product ? We have
clear rules for that and are willing to negotiate agreements.

None of the dozens of X/Open specifications are "freely" available, in
electronic or paper form. We have to recover at least part of our costs,
for obvious reasons. Other organizations, including OSF, XAPIA, OMG, NMF,
UniForum and others, do the same. A single copy of a specification does not
cost more than perhaps a couple of hours of a developer's time. So, what is
the problem ?

I have been speculating in the text above, and perhaps I should not have.
May be the best way of solving a problem that someone perceives is to
first precisely state what the request and its purpose are.
Then we can start a dialogue.

With the best regards,

Petr

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>Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 09:02:56 -0700
>From: vasu@jupiter40.Eng.Sun.COM (R. Vasudevan)
>To: nl@osf.org
>Subject: XFN
>Cc: fn-arch@osf.org, petja@xopen.co.uk
>
>The fact that the XFN spec is not available free of charge or easily
>accessible has forced the discussions and exchanges to be mostly
>non-technical and emotional. This is counterproductive.
>It seems that we (you or me) should seek permission from
>X/Open to provide a limited distribution of the
>XFN specs in electronic form, free of charge
>to the iesg alias.
>
>Hopefully this will help shift the focus to the technical issues and
>solutions to our mutual benefit.
>
>Comments?
>
>..Vasu

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