At the risk of sounding either like a reactionary or a
counter-revolutionary (you pick), I'll step forward to say that an
engineer with no commercial interests is like a politician with no
constituency. In other words: a monster raving looney.
Oh, I don't know; there's plenty of room for open-source authors and
academics here. Open source writers in the IETF can be useful because
they tend to be interested in doing the Right Thing, without being tied to
marketing requirements. Academics can be useful because they sometimes
have a deeper understanding of the problem than we can get in the
commercial world, where we move from project to project and job to job.
(Not an absolute, of course; there are commercial engineers who stick with
the same problem for 20 years, and there are probably some academics who
move from one problem to another every year or so.) Both of these groups
can provide a counterweight to the commercial tendency to focus on
deadlines.
/========================================================\
|John Stracke |Principal Engineer |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com |Incentive Systems, Inc.|
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.|
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|The plural of mongoose is polygoose. |
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