Harold Ogle reports from the Java Community Process:
JSR 235 (Service Data Objects), which was filed in December 2004, has been dormant for almost three years now as a result of a dispute over the use of a supplemental agreement to be signed by any prospective EG member as a prerequisite for joining the expert group. This dispute has now been resolved. The original intention of the supplemental agreement was to enable an external specification, which had already been published with royalty-free patent grants for essential claims, to remain in sync with any enhancements done by the Expert Group while the Expert Group was completing its work. To that end, the supplemental agreement changes the timing of some of the IP grants that the EG members must make. The agreement to use a supplemental license agreement for JSR 235 should not be interpreted as a precedent for subsequent JSRs, nor a commitment that the JCP's processes will be modified to permit such agreements in other cases.
Since the JSR was submitted, multiple enhancements have been made to the input specification, including additional specifications for other languages, many implementation are currently available in both commercial products and in open source (see http://www.osoa.org/display/Main/Implementation+Examples+and+Tools for a list), and the non-Java language versions of the specification are about to begin standardization at OASIS. In March 2007 it was announced that the standardization of the Java version of SDO in the JCP (JSR 235) would be resuming. We are now ready to do so and the JSR 235 page on http://jcp.org will be updated to identify the new spec leads (Radu Preotiuc-Pietro of BEA and Kelvin Goodson of IBM) and to post a copy of the supplemental agreement (SCLA) which prospective EG members must sign in order to join the expert group.
We are now restarting the call for experts to join the JSR 235 EG to complete the standardization of SDO. If you are interested, and are willing to sign the supplemental agreement, please sign up for the EG in the usual manner.