[JOBS] Open Source Open Standards

[greg.rundlett at gmail.com (Greg Rundlett)]

Open and freely available technology standards are a good thing.  They are
especially important to developers of free software.  Open standards create
wider interoperability and 'freedom' that free software developers like.
Free and open standards are critically linked to free and open technology.
[See http://consortiuminfo.org/bulletins/may06.php#feature for a recent
article on this]

About 10 years ago, the HTML 2 markup standard was approved by the W3C.  As
we all know, HTML as a standard data format has allowed people across the
globe to author billions of documents that can be parsed, indexed, searched,
retrieved and read with all kinds of software.   (Do you Google?)  Just this
month the International Standards Organization (ISO) approved the Open
Document Format (ODF) as a standard for office file formats.  The ISO
approval reinforces the already approved ODF standard formed by OASIS[1]
member companies.  The open source project 'Open Office' implements the ODF
file format.  For developers on the Open Office project, the ISO approval
means easier adoption of their hard work by national governments that may
require such approved status as a condition for technology policymaking.

Prediction: In much less than a decade, ODF is going to have an even greater
positive impact on the information society compared with the way that HTML
has over the past 10 years.  For starters, ODF opens 'authorship' to anyone
who knows how to use a computer/word processor whereas only a small fraction
of 'authors' know how to generate HTML documents.  Suddenly the barrier to
authoring just got a lot lower.  Of course today there are so many more
people connected to the Internet.  I could go on with this discussion, but
the point is that really groundbreaking positive work is being done by OASIS
and other standards bodies that helps to shape the technical age that we
live in.

Want to work on combining open standards and open software?  If you would
like to use your skills as an Open Source developer, OASIS is looking for
you.  We have an infrastructure that runs on LAMP with Debian GNU-Linux.  We
use open source development methodologies and tools such as IM, IRC, wikis,
SVN and mailing lists.  We run Content Management and other applications on
top of Zope, Python, PHP and Perl.  We use MySQL and Apache.  All in support
of the formation of some of the most important standards affecting the
Internet and technology today.

http://www.oasis-open.org/jobs/sr-webdeveloper.php
Candidates who can work onsite will be considered preferentially but all
interested are encouraged to apply.
If you have considerable talent and would like to put it to good use, then
please contact greg.rundlett AT oasis-open DOT org.

[1] Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
http://www.oasis-open.org<http://www.oasis-open.org/jobs/sr-webdeveloper.php>
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