Proposal: JSON Schema Standardization under Ecma International

[jdesrosiers]

Background

The JSON Schema community has reached a significant milestone in its development and adoption. As we look toward the future, we have an opportunity to enhance JSON Schema's standing in the industry by pursuing formal standardization under Ecma International (the organization behind TC39, responsible for ECMAScript/JavaScript as well as JSON). We are exploring the establishment of a new Technical Committee (TC) within Ecma International specifically dedicated to schema language standardization, with JSON Schema as a founding Task Group. This would place JSON Schema alongside other critical web technologies and provide a formal standards track for continued development.

What This Means

Based on recent committee discussion, working under the Ecma umbrella could offer a number of benefits and help firm up our processes.

Benefits of Ecma standardization

• Enhanced industry recognition and adoption
• Formal standards process with clear governance
• Alignment with other web standards (ECMAScript, WebAssembly, etc.)
• Increased corporate and institutional support
• Clearer intellectual property framework
• Long-term sustainability and maintenance

The Ecma process

• Open, consensus-based development
• Regular remote or hybrid (face-to-face + remote) meetings and online collaboration
• Formal specification review and approval process

Intellectual Property Requirements

For this initiative to move forward, we need community consensus on Ecma's Patent Policy, Royalty-free TG Extension, and Copyright policy. In short, these policies protect implementers to be able to implement Ecma standards without having to pay to license any patents that may cover any part of the standards, and protect authors to maintain the copyrights to their contribution while allowing Ecma to publish the standard in whole.

This would mean that contributors to the proposed new Ecma TCs agree to license their contributions under Ecma's IPR policies. If a contribution happened in the course of regular employment, or on employer hardware depending on local law and employment agreement, the employer must agree. This ensures that specifications can be implemented by anyone without having to pay patent royalties.

The Ecma IPR policy is designed to be permissive and community-friendly, similar to other standards organizations that specialize in the open web, like W3C and WHATWG.

What it means for participants:

If your company joins such a group, you agree that any patents you own (needed to use the standard) will be licensed to anyone for free. You don’t give up your patents, but you promise not to charge royalties for their use in implementing these specific standards.

Opt-out option

You can opt out specific patents from this commitment, but only during special review windows (at least 60 days long) set at key stages of drafting the standard. This is exceptionally rare. For example, in almost 30 years it has happened three times for ECMAScript, most recently nearly a decade ago.

Opt-outs only apply to new material added after the last window, not to previous contributions or minor edits.

Leaving the group

If you leave, you’re still committed to drafts you contributed to up until your exit.

You can rejoin later, but your prior commitments stay in place for work you were part of before leaving.

Why it matters

This approach encourages open collaboration and wider adoption of standards because companies know they won’t face surprise royalty fees when using the standards.

What We Need from the Community

Here are the points where we would like to see feedback:

1. Support for the initiative: Do you see value in formal Ecma standardization?
2. IPR agreement willingness: Are you willing to participate under Ecma's intellectual property framework?
3. Technical concerns: What aspects of current JSON Schema development are most important to preserve?
4. Process concerns: What questions do you have about how this would affect our development process?

Discussion

Please share your thoughts, concerns, and questions below. We particularly want to hear from core contributors and maintainers, major implementers, organizations using JSON Schema in production, and generally anyone with standards process experience.