Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Withdrawn JSRs

I've checked the status of JSR-277, which was announced as being halted by Sun, but its status did not change to withdrawn. That makes sense, since it was announced as temporarily halted.
So I went to check the list of all withdrawn JSRs, just for curiosity, and the number surprised me: 52. A lot of those were concerning JAIN (which I haven't heard of until now). Some of the JSRs had comments like "withdrawn at the request of the submitter".

If you look at the number of all JSRs (355) we can do simple math and find that 15% of all JSRs have been withdrawn. It is true that they vary a lot in size, as there are umbrella JSRs that have a lot of stuff behind and we have some successful efforts that are heavyweight. Also, among that list there are "spinoffs", like the JSR-8 which originated OSGi. But, is 15% a high rate or considering the fact that standardization is a complex effort that involves people from different organizations which may have different interests, could we say that it is a fairly acceptable percentage ?