The OASIS era

DocBook’s roots date back to 1991 where it began as a joint project of HaL Computer Systems and O’Reilly & Associates (as O’Reilly Media was then called). This work was motivated by a desire to have an interchange schema for Unix documentation, especially “man pages”. Over time, its popularity grew, more organizations became interested, and eventually it spawned its own maintenance organization, the Davenport Group.

In mid-1998, maintenance moved to a Technical Committee (TC) of OASIS. (It was, I believe, the first TC.) At OASIS, the TC produced several OASIS Standards and work on DocBook continued for more than a quarter century, moving from SGML to XML and from DTDs to RELAX NG.

In September, 2024 the remaining TC members decided to declare victory and close the TC. Frankly, the OASIS bureaucracy had become a little overwhelming for a small committee engaged in long term maintenance work.

At some point around that time, OASIS undertook some sort of infrastructure upgrade. From the outside, this seems to have gone spectacularly badly. More than a year later, some pages are still broken, important community projects that had been entrusted to OASIS, such as the xml-dev mailing list and its archives have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

The DocBook mailing lists and archives have also been lost. Or moved behind a member-only paywall, perhaps? It’s hard to tell.