[RFC] LLVM Foundation statement in favor of open access to standards documents

[RFC] LLVM 基金会关于支持标准文档开放获取的声明

tl;dr: ISO is seeking testimonials from “open source organizations” by June 4th on the importance of open access to ISO standards documents; this RFC is about that statement.

简而言之：ISO 正在征集“开源组织”的证言，截止日期为 6 月 4 日，旨在探讨开放获取 ISO 标准文档的重要性；本 RFC 讨论的正是这份声明。

Background

背景

Roughly speaking, under the usual ISO and IEC rules, all committee-related documents are only accessible to committee members or other members of their organization. There was an historical experiment run by JTC1, the committee within ISO which is responsible for technology-related standards, to open access to committee documents. This experiment was successful but was never finalized with ISO, so the documents were left freely available in practice but ISO had expected access to be closed off again. Fast forward about 30 years later: ISO realized there were far more documents with open access than they thought and so they’re trying to close off all access to those documents moving forward. JTC1 has been working to convince ISO and IEC about the importance of open access for several years now, and as part of that conversation, ISO is seeking testimonials from companies and open source organizations on the importance of open access to standards documents. The documents in question are: working drafts, committee drafts, and proposals (N-numbers documents, but also potentially P-numbered papers including things like issues lists and defect reports); other documents such as meeting minutes, agendas, and committee policies will become closed access and the final version of the standard will remain closed access as it is today.

粗略地说，根据通常的 ISO 和 IEC 规则，所有与委员会相关的文档仅对委员会成员或其组织的其他成员开放。ISO 内部负责技术相关标准的委员会 JTC1 曾进行过一项历史性实验，旨在开放委员会文档的访问权限。该实验虽然成功，但从未在 ISO 层面最终定案，因此这些文档在实践中保持了免费获取，但 ISO 一直预期会重新关闭访问权限。快进约 30 年后：ISO 意识到开放获取的文档数量远超预期，因此他们正试图在未来关闭对这些文档的所有访问权限。多年来，JTC1 一直致力于向 ISO 和 IEC 说明开放获取的重要性。作为该对话的一部分，ISO 正在向企业和开源组织征集关于标准文档开放获取重要性的证言。所涉及的文档包括：工作草案、委员会草案和提案（N 号文档，也可能包括 P 号文件，如问题列表和缺陷报告）；其他文档（如会议纪要、议程和委员会政策）将转为封闭访问，而标准的最终版本将维持现状，保持封闭访问。

Our community would likely have never existed were it not for open access to these documents and ISO closing access now poses a significant threat to our community’s future because standards like C, C++, and FORTRAN are the backbone of our implementation and of our 17k+ downstream forks. Our community members come from all over the world, are of all ages, come and go as they please, and we do not have the means by which to manage them as though they were employees of the LLVM Foundation so that we can continue to guarantee everyone has access to the same information necessary for implementing these standards. Further, this hinders our ability to meaningfully communicate with our users for things like the status of our implementation efforts which are tracked on a per-document basis for both features and defect reports, or for our users to validate our interpretation of the standard when there’s disagreement over a particular behavior.

如果不是因为这些文档的开放获取，我们的社区可能根本不会存在。现在 ISO 关闭访问权限对我们社区的未来构成了重大威胁，因为 C、C++ 和 FORTRAN 等标准是我们实现以及 17,000 多个下游分支的基石。我们的社区成员来自世界各地，年龄各异，来去自由，我们没有办法像管理 LLVM 基金会员工那样管理他们，从而无法继续保证每个人都能获取实现这些标准所需的相同信息。此外，这也阻碍了我们与用户进行有效沟通的能力，例如我们针对功能和缺陷报告按文档跟踪的实现进度，或者当对特定行为存在分歧时，用户无法验证我们对标准的解读。

Plan

计划

I met with members of the LLVM Foundation this week to apprise them of the situation and they agree that the LLVM Foundation should make a statement on behalf of the community, but the statement they make should come from us. The rough plan for this is:

本周我与 LLVM 基金会的成员会面，向他们通报了情况。他们同意 LLVM 基金会应代表社区发表声明，但声明的内容应出自我们之手。初步计划如下：

I have linked the draft the statement I think the community should make, just to give us a starting place;
我已链接了我认为社区应该发表的声明草案，仅作为我们的起点；
The community can recommend edits on that draft statement up until May 27; I will update the statement as suggestions arrive;
社区可以在 5 月 27 日之前对该草案提出修改建议；我将根据收到的建议更新声明；
The Project Council will meet out-of-band on May 28 to finalize the statement;
项目委员会将于 5 月 28 日召开特别会议，以敲定最终声明；