Your process for yanking a logo requires a vendor's implementation to
fail an interoperability test against a known standards compliant
implementation. Anything less would make the logo meaningless. That
smells dangeoursly like conformance testing. And that's why you're
getting such push-back.
Well, this comment is undoubtedly going to cause some more
push-back. :)
I seem to be getting two conflicting viewpoints:
#1 Vendors can only be trusted to be interoperable on their own,
and can not be forced to conform.
#2 Vendors absolutely can't be trusted to be interoperable,
without conformance testing.
I guess everyone approaches things in different ways.
And that's why I made the proposal. Because this idea works with
either viewpoint.
Personally, in this particular kind of massively distributed, diverging
objectives scenario, I say "trust everyone to do what's right"
and then use the logo yanking process to (1) identify ill behaving
vendors / products, (2) give them double reasonable opportunity
to correct, and then in the absence of any good faith effort
(3) publicly (but nicely) flog them by yanking the logo.
Trust everyone to do what's right. Reward the people who do the
right thing (by allowing them to use the logo). And people who
do the wrong thing can lose it.
I'm not really a believer in conformance testing, because the
space of the Internet is so rapidly evolving, anything you
test against is a moving target, and because something conforms
at one point, it may not next week. I think that sentence addresses
the majority of "problem-type" criticism the idea has had.
I am absolutely on everyone's side and agree with everything
posted as such. Everyone has listed problems, but no one has
said they can't be worked around.
I'm just looking for a solution that creates significant, immediate
benefit for people who try to follow standards. And when bad
vendors come around and start doing bad things to hurt interoperability
(an incredible benefit to customers, consumers, you name it), the
IETF makes it easier for
Mostly, I'm looking for some level of easy-in product segmentation
for contractual, customer visibility, and CIO empowerment type things.
If you are a vendor, and your customer gets pissed at you and says
you aren't being a good vendor, and you said you would be, it
gives them an angle to push. A slow, bureaucratic one, but a way
to lead vendors, through reward, to do the right thing.
Kyle Lussier
AutoNOC LLC