Hm, ietf going in the business of rubber stamping? Even ITU never
considered anything like labelling products to be "ITU-compatible" .
They just publish "Recommendations". Every vendor is free to use,
bend, or ignore those Recommendations. Yet, the global phone
network (and the greater part of the global transport network carrying
the Internet) operates according to those Recommendations ...
Every successfull phone call proves that such voluntary standardisation
scheme, without any formal certification mechanism, can work.
Point taken. And that's certainly true in markets where the
vendors respect each other, or at least, at a bare minimum,
play the game in full compliance with existing laws.
But what happens when you are in a market, where vendors absorb
public standards and work to proprietorize them and/or destroy
them, as a function of the business model? My view, flat out,
is that this is "cheating the game" and there are plenty of
laws on the books to cover it, but if you are willing to donate
enough cash to politicians, you can certainly be granted exemptions.
It's an age old story, I know. But my view is that the markets and
customers are best served when you have uniform public standards for
core technologies, and the vendors fight it out for the best
implementations. Am I wrong here? Shouldn't a role of the IETF be
to strengthen public standards to the point it's suicide for a
vendor to go it alone? Won't that ultimately cut in half, or more
the amount of work done?
All I am saying is that an easy, no hassles, good faith,
logo requirement, at very low cost, would go a long ways to
improving interoperability and technology development efficiency.
Today's CIO's and product decision makers are pretty defense-less
when it comes to negotiating with badly behaving vendors. They
don't have any leverage. All I want to do, is for the CIOs that
care about interoperability, we give them the ability to leverage
how important interoperability is. As the world stands now, they
can say "we want interoperability" but there is no way to insure it.
There are markets like the telephone networks and other networks
where public standards compliance is *mandatory* in order for
any product to work, as it is a function of the whole. But what
about in more segmented markets where a given vendor *isn't* forced
to work with competing products for market acceptance?
I think it's important to maintain public standards and have
the best vendor implementations of these requirements rise
to the top, and remain, in full faith to the standard.
Maybe it isn't the IETF's job, maybe that's the debate, but I
would argue, the organization of the standard bearer should be
able to place the "one true mark" on things that fit the
conceptual model.
Kyle Lussier
AutoNOC LLC