The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; /oʊˈeɪ.sɪs/) is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of projects - both open standards and open source - for computer security, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.
It began as a trade association of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) tool vendors to cooperatively promote the adoption of SGML through mainly educational activities, though some amount of technical activity was also pursued including an update of the CALS Table Model specification and specifications for fragment interchange and entity management.
[4] The following standards are under development or maintained by OASIS technical committees: Adhesion to the consortium requires some fees to be paid, which must be renewed annually, depending on the membership category adherents want to access.
[6] Among the adherents are members from Dell, IBM, ISO/IEC, Cisco Systems, KDE e.V., Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, The Document Foundation, universities, government agencies, individuals and employees from other less-known companies.
For example: Like many bodies producing open standards e.g. ECMA,[10] OASIS added a Reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing (RAND) clause to its policy in February 2005.
[citation needed] Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS from 2001 to 2008,[14] minimized the risk that a company could take advantage of a standard to request royalties when it has been established, saying "If it's an option nobody uses, then what's the harm?
[opinion] Big actors like Microsoft could have indeed applied pressure and made a sine-qua-non condition to access the consortium, and possibly jeopardize/boycott the standard if such a clause was not present.
[17] He also self-published a blog post blaming Microsoft of involving people to improve and modify the accuracy of ODF and OpenXML Wikipedia articles.