Hi Sarah,
I think that one of the important points that most folks miss is the intent of the DITA Open Toolkit. In publishing the toolkit, IBM and OASIS were trying to do one thing: establish a reference implementation of the DITA specification. This is not the language itself but what processing engines might do in specific cases. There is little investment in making the OT a production environment and that's probably a good thing. Basically, the client who decides that DITA is a good solution, with or without specializations, should be free to choose whatever implementation of the specification best fits them as long as that implementation follows the specification. Whether it's an open solution or a proprietary solution depends on the needs and abilities of the user. Some can afford the licensing expenses and some cannot.
If you're very well-versed in XSLT and XSLT-FO, you could even roll your own implementation and publish it to the world for use. You are free to do what you will to create whatever output you need. That's one of the beauties of DITA; the language and the specification allow the freedom to do myriads of things depending on your comfort level with various aspects of the entirety.
Will the Open Toolkit ever go away? I doubt it. There's a need for a reference implementation so those with the resources and imagination can build the best transform engine they can for specific needs. Will more folks go to implementations other than the Open Toolkit? Yes. I fully expect that all clients will find some method to produce the elegant output they need from the available semantics and metadata and that's how it should be. A standard should not restrict but enable.
Commenting by HaloScan
