Stone has credentials for describing change in software standardization. The perceived success of his Object Management Group (OMG) challenges traditional standards organizations to reassess their practices for coping with rapidly evolving information technology. This paper describes the motivations and mechanisms of the OMG, the organization that is developing the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) specifications.

The paper is worth reading for Stone’s excellent description of the OMG. Furthermore, his focus on interoperability rather than on portability as the proper role for software standards is a welcome insight. It is regrettable, though, that Stone differentiates the OMG approach from more traditional routes to standardization by inaccurately disparaging the accredited standards organizations. Particularly unfortunate is his appeal to politically fashionable libertarian themes in claiming that accredited standards are creations of the government. He is wrong, of course; standards in the US are developed by more than 200 organizations, each independent of government and each following its own process. Even the accrediting party, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), is a private organization.

Stone criticizes the slowness of the accredited organizations by saying that “five to seven years to implement a standard for programming languages…is a ludicrous time frame.” The point is arguable. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) project to standardize Ada 95, for example, was established in 1991, two years after OMG was formed; today, workable implementations of both Ada 95 and CORBA are just appearing on the market. Ludicrousness is in the eye of the beholder.