On Sat, 26 Jan 2002 18:14:56 PST, Kyle Lussier <lussier(_at_)autonoc(_dot_)com>
said:
It's just for us, as a vendor, having something like this allows us
to contract to supporting "interoperable" third party vendors that
are well behaved, and we get an "opt-out" on vendors whom the
IETF community has put a big red "X" on.
There's problems here:
1) Two logo'ed products can still fail to interoperate. Remember - this
thread was started by a failure to interoperate. But by the time the
IETF even *heard* about the MIME bug that started this discussion, the
vendor had already acknowledged it was a bug, and assigned a bug ID to it.
So the vendor is being responsive, keeps the logo - and it didn't tell
you anything about the product.
2) Two X-out'ed products can still manage to interoperate.
3) If there's *no* conformance testing, what does it *actually* tell
you other than "the company had $100 and bothered sending it in?".
4) What do you do if you spec that logo on an RFP, and only one
vendor has a logo'ed product - and it's the worst of the bunch?
I have in my bedroom a night light, which I purchased at a local
grocery store. It has a UL logo on it, which doesn't tell me much
about its suitability as a night light (I can't tell if it's bright
enough, or if it's too bright, or what its power consumption is),
but it *does* tell me 2 things:
1) It has been *tested* and found free of any known safety design problems.
It may not *work* as a night light, but it won't shock me when I go to
throw it in the trash can because it's not suitable.
2) A high enough percentage of night light manufacturers get UL listed
that I can afford to be suspicious of any company that doesn't have
the logo on their product.
Ask yourself this - if there's no up-front testing of minimum compliance,
how is the $100 any different from the money customarily paid in
some parts of the world to the representatives of the local <insert
ethnic-based organized crime syndicate>?
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Senior Engineer
Virginia Tech