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Re: How many standards or protocols...

2002-04-16 20:15:02
On Tue, 16 Apr 2002 17:48:03 EDT, John Stracke 
<jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com>  said:
IS-IS as deployed on the Internet is an interesting case.  It is clearly 
open and is not proprietary, but as you point out there is no complete 
specification.   I don't think we have a term for this combination :-)

Yes, we do: "proprietary".  It's a jargon term for standards development; 
looking in a standard English dictionary won't help.  It just means "not 
open".

No, the problem with IS-IS is that the spec *IS* 100% open, including the
non-existent parts.  As a literary  analogy, if Don Knuth were to place his
5-volume set into the public domain, you'd still have a hard time implementing
the algorithms in volume 5....