Re: How many standards or protocols...

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002 21:02:08 PDT, todd glassey said:

Actually James you have to a big extent hit the cause of the problem on the
head. The IETF is still predominantly Engineering Staffers and the Internet
has evolved to a point where it now needs Commercial input too.  The lack of
commercial input into the IETF is clearly a statement of the IETF's concern
about being told what it can and can't develop... and to date the IETF has
long survived by saying "We know better, we are the technical gurus". But
this is inaccurate and a smokescreen these
days.


You can be as great a salesman as you want, but you still can't design
a stable feedback loop that responds in less than 2*RTT across the system.

You don't let salespeople design bridges or cars or toasters either.

There's nothing wrong with a salesperson saying "It would be really great if
there were a protocol that let people do XYZ easily".  But unless they actually
know something about protocol design, they shouldn't design it.

The other side of the coin is different though. These are End-User Protocols
and now more than ever these need to be governed or certified by commercial
acceptance... before they get to the point of being a proposed standard.


OK.. So it should suceed in the marketplace, and *THEN* be standardized?

1) Once it's a success, why should the company turn over change control?
Sure, Sun did it for NFS, but that was many years ago, and many people were
surprised that they did so.  Do you see any good reason why Sun would do
that with Java, or Microsoft do it with their .NET stuff?

2) The time for there to be a *full* review of a protocol for things like
scaling and security issues is *BEFORE* it gets widely deployed.  Go look
at WEP or Microsoft's first version of a point-to-point solution.

The problem as I see it is that the Engineer (or child) in us is frightened
by this, since traditionally the commercial folks (the adults) have driven
home that no matter how cool our inventions (or toys) are, there may in
fact be no commercial use for them... and they, in the interest of Business,
killed them (our toys) as such. What that meant is that the solutions we


RFC2026, section 4.2.4.

-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Computer Systems Senior Engineer
                                Virginia Tech

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