Jon Bosak has urged that future development of SAX should be conducted in a "properly constituted OASIS technical committee".

In a post to XML-DEV he said such an action would ensure "the evolution of the specification from this point on is guaranteed to take place under a democratic process that is open to all interested parties, provides an IPR policy based on an open-source model, and is visible to the world at large."

While these aims make sense for vendors, such a move might not be totally palatable to the loosely-knit collection of independents on XML-DEV, many of whom contributed to the development of SAX. There is a perception that consortia such as OASIS are inaccessible to the independent developer.

David Megginson, co-ordinator of SAX, responded in a post entitled "Democracy and the future of SAX":

"If we strike a formal committee for SAX at this point, even a small one, then it will take months or years before a final version of SAX2 sees the light of day; furthermore, people outside the committee (that's most of you) will end up with effectively no say at all."

Megginson goes on to indicate that after SAX2 is finalized, he would like to relinquish the role of maintainer. He further requests participants in XML-DEV to "at least to start thinking privately about where SAX should go after SAX2/Java and SAX2/C++ are finished".