I'm hearing of not-to-be-named elusive commercial grids quite often, and I'd love to learn from their experience. If they are happy with the existing standards - good for them. Being so much shrouded in secrecy, they obviously have no need to interoperate.
Perhaps not as we would define interoperate. But they have much stricter requirements on backwards compatibility and API stability than has ever been demonstrated by any academic software provider!
In our case, the key motivation has been clear: interoperability between 3 specific non-secret production grids; this group spawned from GIN and thus it is not surprising indeed that it has problems often opposite to those of secret grids.
Which started off with a secret meeting at CERN and is now continuing with the co-chairs going off into a closed huddle to define their requirements! Hmmm... openness!
Seriously, one key fragment in this picture is GLUE2, which was developed mostly by gLite, ARC and Unicore people, and the very origin of PGI lies in integrating these 3 standards. Obviously, those who do not need GLUE2 may have a different opinion, but PGI started as a BES/JSDL/GLUE2 integration effort, and its motto used to be "Stay focused".
And what happened to motto...? Did it get deprecated? Or do we need some t-shirts for OGF 26 to publicise it? This whole thread has (effectively) been about openly making progress across a broader front so that all issues are dealt with (no splitting or forking) rather than serialising the work. The WG chairs seem to want to serialise and slow down the progress... there seems to be willingness within the WG to parallelise and speed up. Interesting contradiction! I think this is the first time of seen this at OGF! Steven