[Tinyos-alliance] Standard Bridge for 5/16: 1-415-692-0828 ext: 8604 pin: 3987#

[David E. Culler]

David E. Culler wrote:

> Standard Bridge for 5/16: 1-415-692-0828 ext:    8604 pin: 3987#
>
> Our work from the last meeting was to converge on the one-pager.  
> There hasn't been much circulation on that, so we will try to bring 
> that to closure in the call and the fan out phase.  Let's target a 1/2 
> hour meeting.  By the following week, we should have circulated all 
> materials to the community for feedback and started drafting 
> documents. _______________________________________________
> Tinyos-alliance mailing list
> Tinyos-alliance at millennium.berkeley.edu
> https://mail.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tinyos-alliance 
>

 Below is the text of the one-pager that was distributed 2 weeks ago - 
with the price tag added.  Now that people have had a chance to study it,
I would like to reach closure on it today.

TinyOS Open Technology Alliance

Introduction

The TinyOS community has grown to include several thousand developers
and users in dozens of countries, plus hundreds of companies,
universities, and government institutions.  It has built a broad
technology base for wireless embedded networks in an open, informal
collaboration that was largely rooted at the University of California,
Berkeley.  With the growing commericial and technological impact of
the community and the de facto standards represented by the TinyOS
distribution, we are creating a organizational structure for the
advancement of the open embedded network ecosystem around TinyOS and
support the activities, interactions, and development of the worldwide
academic and industrial TinyOS community.

Mission

The mission of the TinyOS Alliance is to provide a forum to facilitate
the continued growth of a healthy TinyOS developer and user community
with support for innovation as well as industry advancement, the
development and maintenance of a stable, technically-sound base of
TinyOS technology and surrounding tools through the creation of
standard interfaces and protocols, vetted extensions, open reference
implementations, technical documents, testing and verification suites,
and educational materials, the contribution of innovative technology
from a world-wide research community, as well as the maturation and
dissemination of these contributions, the promotion of the technology,
the community, and the impact of networked embedded systems.

Participation

The Alliance continues the TinyOS tradition of promoting broad
membership.  It seeks to keep barriers to entry low in all respects:
legal, financial, and organizational.  As with IETF and Apache, it is
a meritocracy that encourages, promotes, and credits the contributions
of its members.  It provides an organizational structure that reinforces
important, broadly adopted design choices to build consensus and establish
key de facto standard interfaces.

The fundamental membership is individual, as individuals create work 
products,
serve on working groups and committees, and vote.  We have two forms:

  * Member: Individual who signs the Alliance membership form and 
participates
    at a basic level, typically as consumer of technology.

  * Contributing Member: Individual who joins working groups,
    attends meetings, or contributes code or other assets to the
    Alliance.   Contributing members are elected to various posts and
    have voting rights.  Members may submit a request to be a contributing
    member with a short description of contributions.

Corporations and organizational have institutional membership, which 
reflects
their degree of effort.

  * Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional organization
    that signs the institutional membership form, agrees to appear on 
the Alliance
    web site and documents, and pays a nominal administrative fee.
    (Annual $500 for small companies and non-profits, $1000 for larger)

  * Contributing Institutional Member: Corporation or institutional
    organization that provide financial support, resources,
    facilities, technical contributions, intellectual property,
    marketing support, or other meaningful contributions to the
    Alliance.    
   (Annual $2000 for small companies and non-profits, $5000 for larger)

IP and Licensing

Intellectual property will be addressed in a manner similar to the
IETF.  Meetings, discussions, presentations, and technical documents
are non-confidential. Membership does not require or provide an
explicit IP pool, as is found in Zigbee or W3C, nor conducting a
comprehensive IP inventory.  Members have an on-going responsibility
to disclose IP of relvance, whether it is their property or not, so
that Alliance members can make informed decisions and trade-offs.
Working groups seek to develop approaches, interfaces, and protocols
that can reasonably be implemented without the use of proprietary
technology, although companies may well develop their own proprietary
versions.  Where members choose to donate IP, it will be treated along
with other forms of contribution in establishing member status.

The source licensing policy seeks to promote "rough consensus AND
running code".  In particular, it encourages the creation of quality
reference implementations of standardized interfaces, while permitting
proprietary development beyond the reference, and crediting the
authors of code and other work products for their efforts.  The
current TinyOS code base on SourceForge carries a small set of
variants of the BSD license in which the Copyright is held by the
author's institution.  The Alliance will authorize a small set of BSD
templates for use in code that it distributes.  Alliance rules
stipulate that use of the code or other work products for commercial
products, research reports, or social good should give credit to the
authors and tools will be provided to facilitate such creditation.

Organizational Structure

The core of the Alliance organization is the working groups.  Each has
a chair, membership, and charter.  Overseeing the working groups is a
Steering committee, composed of WG chairs and members elected at
large.  The SC establishes WG policy, manages WG creation,
termination, and arbitration, and supervise activities to resolve
conflicting directions and move the process towards overall
architectural harmony.  Working groups may be longstanding or
short-term and may be chartered by the SC or formed from grass roots
efforts.  As a non-profit, the Alliance also has a director, a board,
and modest adminstrative support.  Almost all positions in the Alliance
will be on a volunteer basis.