Subject: Re: How many standards or protocols...

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 14:11:43 -0400

>What is the case is
>that each WG Chair gets to decide what concensus is for their WG 

Not really; they can be overruled or replaced.

>The problem with the operations is that the rules change form group
>to group and this has serious technical and financial implications for
>anyone trying to mount a standards effort as part of a product release or
>market development activity.

Anybody tying a product release schedule to completion of a standard is 
already taking an unwarranted risk.  They're placing their company's 
future in the hands of outsiders who owe that company nothing.  This is 
the case no matter where the standard is coming from; the IETF's volunteer 
nature just exaggerates the effect.

/===============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer            |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.       |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.       |
|===============================================================|
|Any sufficiently rigged demo is indistinguishable from advanced|
|technology.                                                    |
\===============================================================/

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From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 19:36:18 GMT

*> 	Now the original point was someone else's inaccurate claim that the 
  *> IETF
  *> let both IS-IS and OSPF bloom, when really the IETF originally chose 
  *> OSPF --
  *> and IS-IS made a separate come-back in the deployed world during the 
  *> mid-90s.

Yes -- except for historical accuracy, it was the Bad Old Despotic IAB
who originally chose OSPF -- in fact, caused an IETF WG to come into
existence to design "THE" standard link state routing protocol for
the Internet.

In those days, of course, OSI and Internet were bitter rivals, so
IS-IS was not initially received kindly in the Internet community.
I believe Paul Mockapetris chaired a flame-off debate between
OSPF and IS-IS advocates as some early Interop.

Bob Braden

  *> 
  *> Cheers,
  *> 
  *> Ran
  *> [email-masked]
  *>

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From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 17:31:45 -0400

>this is a standards
>organization and not a place where we decide who we like and which of 
their
>projects we are going to allow to come through us today and not.
>
>That's not the way any other GLOBAL standards orgs work.

Which globe are you talking about? On this one, that's *exactly* the way 
standards bodies work.  Go to the ITU and propose your pet project; see 
how far you get.  You'll need corporate backing, at the very least.

A group that approved any spec proposed to it wouldn't be a standards body 
at all; it'd be a vanity publishing house.

|Dave Barry for President! He'll Keep Dan Quayle. (OK, it's old)|

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From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 10:21:17 -0400

>At the risk of sounding either like a reactionary or a 
>counter-revolutionary (you pick), I'll step forward to say that an 
>engineer with no commercial interests is like a politician with no 
>constituency.  In other words: a monster raving looney.

Oh, I don't know; there's plenty of room for open-source authors and 
academics here.  Open source writers in the IETF can be useful because 
they tend to be interested in doing the Right Thing, without being tied to 
marketing requirements.  Academics can be useful because they sometimes 
have a deeper understanding of the problem than we can get in the 
commercial world, where we move from project to project and job to job. 
(Not an absolute, of course; there are commercial engineers who stick with 
the same problem for 20 years, and there are probably some academics who 
move from one problem to another every year or so.) Both of these groups 
can provide a counterweight to the commercial tendency to focus on 
deadlines.

/========================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer     |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.|
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.|
|========================================================|
|The plural of mongoose is polygoose.                    |
\========================================================/

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From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 17:01:49 -0400

>Or more practically, you'd probably want to sell a service based upon
>you're one implementation of that single instance. Just keep skimming
>from everyone's pocket to keep the fatted calf alive until the patent
>protection ran out

Yeah, I thought of that--but, with so much at stake, patents wouldn't mean 
much.  Someone would read your patent, duplicate your work, and go set up 
shop in a poor nation that's more interested in feeding its people than 
enforcing your patent.  You might do better not applying for a patent at 
all, and just keeping it secret--but Nature keeps no secrets; once you'd 
proved it was possible, someone else would figure it out.

/=================================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer              |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.         |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.         |
|=================================================================|
|Among animals, it's eat or be eaten. Among people, it's define or|
|be defined.                                                      |
\=================================================================/