From derek@knosof.uucp Wed Oct 26 20:22:09 1994 Received: from eros.Britain.EU.net by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA05469 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 26 Oct 1994 20:22:09 +0100 Received: from pyra.co.uk by eros.britain.eu.net with UUCP id ; Wed, 26 Oct 1994 19:21:54 +0000 Received: by knosof.UUCP (anilla/UUCP-Project/rel-1.0/11-05-86) id AA05054; Wed, 26 Oct 94 20:16:12 BST Date: Wed, 26 Oct 94 20:16:12 BST From: derek@knosof.uucp (Derek M Jones) Message-Id: <9410261916.AA05054@knosof.UUCP> To: wg15@pyra.co.uk Subject: What problem are we trying to solve? X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 All, >From: D.Cannon@exeter.ac.uk >X-Sequence: SC22WG15@dkuug.dk 427 >Subject: (wg15-uk 598) (SC22WG15.427) Applications Conformance discussion paper > > ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 outlines (in Section 1.3.2) a set of four > 'levels' of application conformance to the standard. The UK has > proposed an additional level of 'Rigorous Conformance', (WG15 AI > 9405-04), which is under consideration. > > One solution may be to register a set of 'trade-names' > corresponding to these levels and to allow vendors to use these > as 'badges' on their products. There would not necessarily be > any requirement for proof of conformance to these levels, > although first or third party testing would be encouraged (by > the users). One of the requirements for Trademarking a name, in the UK at least, is that the name not be descriptive. I would claim that the names used in the POSIX standards are descriptive, they may even have intended to be descriptive ;-) Any well written advertising copy will fail to make any explicit claims. Such claims could prove expensive if reported to the Advertising Standards Authority or your local Trading Standards Officer. Why Trademark names that are not currently being used by vendors? Especially when users themselves don't even know what those terms mean. Although I say so myself the solution to the problem is neatly stated in "Verifying Claims of Open Systems Conformance" in the Proceedings of the Sun UK User Group/UK Unix User Group Conference 11-13 Jan 94. Technical details can be found in the Proceedings of the 14th AFCEA Europe Symposium "Applications Open Systems Conformance Testing" and the Spring 1992 EurOpen & Usenix Workshop "Applications POSIX.1 Conformance Testing. What it boils down to is that vendors will to do something about application conformance to standards when buyers to ask for it. May one inquire whether the English NHS ask their suppliers if they conform to Open Systems Standards? derek