NMRAnet falters

Despite a lot of press indicating that the NMRA board actually approved an NMRAnet physical layer, the NMRA legal people and senior officers say they did not! The erroneously placed information is expected to be removed from the NMRA web site very shortly. In the meantime it has been confirmed that the NMRA Board has in fact issued an invitation for the working group to present to them in Sacramento in July.

I understand that a lot of email and phone contact has been had between the working group and the NMRA to clear up a number of issues. That is now possibly in hand and we can proceed in a more orderly fashion, we hope.

As Time Goes By...

A beautiful song, but should it be appropriate to look back on a post that is nearly two and a half years old (April 2008) and realise that nothing has really changed?

Back then I wrote about the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association) and the various attempts at a model railroad layout control bus (LCB) standards formulation. And as I look back over it all I find that nothing has really changed. The on guy who hijacked the process is still trying to bully other participants to his way of thinking whilst at the same time refusing to expose any of his design work, code, or draft standards. His brother happens to be the corporate officer responsible for the standards and compliance process. What a lovely cozy position to be in.

I meant to post these remarks a few days ago, but they got forgotten. However in light of what I wrote earlier today they remain no less appropriate.

If at first you dont succeed, just wait, they will kick you again!

As of today it seems the news is out. The board did actually consider the matter, and now we know officially. The NMRAnet working group hasn't been told yet, nor have the authors of the document submitted.

NMRANET standard adopted

The board reviewed two versions of S-9.x.1 for the definition of the physical layer of the

layout control bus called NMRANET. The version modified by Didrik Voss, manager of

the Standards & Conformance Dept., was adopted. With this approval, the sponsors for

the other version will be invited to present their concerns to the Board at the Sacramento

meeting. S-9.x.1 was re-designated as S-9.5.1 and will be posted on the NMRA web site.

Several manufacturers of electronics for model railroading have been waiting for this

new NMRA standard so they can adopt it for their product line.

The actual BOD meeting report summary can be found online here.

As well as not being informed even informally about the BOD meeting considerations and vote we have yet to receive our invitation to address the board in Sacramento in July. Let's hope it arrives soon, we need to dust off all the material that we guess wasn't presented to the board in February. But why does it have to be this way?

We don't know in any detail what happened at the BOD meeting, today is the first we know of anything other than the appearance of the S9.5.1 document on the NMRA web site. What is even more galling is that we now know that the NMRA board has sanctioned a document which is a derivative work from material where copyright is claimed by its authors. No permission was sought or granted, no acknowledgement given. It is as though the NMRA feels it is above the provisions of copyright law in the US and Canada (two of the authors are either Canadian or Canadian residents) and the DMCA in the USA. Pretty shabby treatment really when all things are considered.

Back in December 2010 I responded to a help wanted ad placed with Gerry Leone, communications director for the NMRA, for electronics engineers to help with the development of NMRAnet. This request was never sent to the NMRAnet working group list, nor to the DCC working group list. But it was in the NMRA magazine and so I responded. The day after Gerry acknowledged my email I received this response form Di Voss:

John,

 

You must be the only Electronics Engineer in Canada or, at least, the only one that responds to my help wanted ads.

Since you are already part of the effort, I do not need to provide you a summary of our work.

 

Didrik

It seems that my work is to continue to provide soundly based, well argued professional work. Seems that my job is to accept being treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark and fed with .... well, I think you know the answer (at least any self respecting Aussie would). I am to toil diligently in the fields, submit my work, have it used to creative a derivative document without permission or acknowledgement, not be told what the considerations of the material submitted are and to just keep on taking it and liking it.

So disheartening, so disillusioning. No wonder nobody wants to play in the NMRAnet or NMRA-DCC sandboxes any more, if this is how we are to be treated. Onwards and upwards OpenLCB!

Seems some things never change! The NMRAnet saga 3 years on

When I wrote my post yesterday referring to the debacle surrounding the NMRA and the NMRAnet process I had in the back of my mind that this had been going on for a long time, what I had forgotten was that I posted on  the same broken process back in April of 2008, close to three whole years ago. In that post I referred to the process that had been going off the rails routinely for the previous 12 months. Which means this debacle must have been going on for about 4 years now!

Insane.....

And we still can't get a sensible word out of the NMRA process.

During that time an amazing group of people have developed the bulk of a standard series and protocol family known as OpenLCB. Their work and their efforts in the NMRAnet working group have formed the basis of the S9.x.1 standard proposal which has been butchered by the amateurs I referred to yesterday. As a part of that effort I find the last minute unsupported modifications outside of the working group process to be an abomination.

How much longer does it have to go on?

Or maybe it needs to come to a stop now, and like the DCC working group before it, fade into oblivion. Since June of 2009 the DCC community has been split in two. A US based manufacturers group which only admits established large scale commercial DCC manufacturers to its discussions, and a European group which insists that all its meetings will be in Europe and business conducted in German. If the NMRAnet working group persists, then I wonder how long it will be before we come to the same impasse?

In the meantime maybe the "OpenLCB" group on Yahoo groups is a good place for anybody wnating to know what an LCB (Layout Control Bus) really looks like.