[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Costs of the W3C
"Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...> writes: > For a lot of one-person shops, myself included, $5000/year amounts to a > tithe (one part in ten) or much worse. Perhaps if I felt a deep religious > commitment to the Web, I'd be willing to contribute at this level, but I've > had a hard enough time finding the $250 for OASIS. > > Book-writing isn't that lucrative a business, however much I may enjoy it. > I don't see why that should keep me out of the W3C, however. Let's make the following assumptions: 1. You make US$50K/year from book writing and consulting. 2. You work at or near full capacity. 3. Tomorrow, the W3C decides to make membership free. Now, you decide to join just one of the WGs. To join, you have to agree to commit (I think) 20% of your time to the WG (more if you're an editor, chair, or technical lead) which means that the base cost for you of getting involved is US$10K/year. On top of that, you have to pay the long-distance charges for, say, a one-hour weekly teleconference and you have to pay travel expenses to at least a couple of face-to-face meetings, not all of which are in North America. TOTAL COST: at least US$12K/year for each WG you join. Now, that's better than the US$17K it would have cost if you had to pay the membership fee as well, but it's hardly sustainable for a one-person consulting shop either way. I'd suggest, then, that the biggest barrier right now is not the fee but the whole committee structure and process of the W3C -- it's designed for companies that can afford to free up engineers to do standards work, and that tends to mean companies with revenues over US$5M/year. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ or CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 Please note: New list subscriptions now closed in preparation for transfer to OASIS.
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