<flame> This is a political issue between Microsoft and Sun. Just because senior management at these companies act like little boys in a school yard, it doesn't mean that WS-I is just some Microsoft puppet organization.

There are plenty of other serious Java players that have board seats at WS-I. To wit: BEA, IBM, and Oracle. (also Fujitsu and HP) Microsoft only has one seat on a board of 9 (soon to be 11).

I think it was a serious mistake on the part of WS-I not to invite Sun to be on the board. It certainly has had a significant impact on the group's credibility. But I can understand the reluctance of some of the players (not just Microsoft) to invite them to play. Sun was very slow to get involved with Web services. For a very long time Sun was trying to undermine the entire SOAP/WSDL/UDDI infrastructure in favor of ebXML. (I know. I was at Sun at the time fighting in favor of SOAP.) Sun was being less than constructive in the standards efforts. Would you invite someone to be on your board if you had doubts about their good intentions?

Almost all major web services contributions have been joint efforts by Microsoft and IBM. Once the specs have been published, the two of them invite others to join the work. I don't see a whole lot of Microsoft hoop jumping going on. I see constructive joint effort. Sun is as welcome to join the effort as anyone else. I was very pleased to see them join WS-I. They certainly didn't win any points by standing in a corner and pouting because they weren't picked first. </flame>

Anne