Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 5:32 PM -0700 9/14/05, Michael Thomas wrote:
You mean we could invent Bitorrent? :)
BitTorrent (note the spelling) does a lot of very nice things, but not
those. For those interested, the BitTorrent protocol is described at
<http://www.bittorrent.com/protocol.html>.
Always the risk when one is being flippant, but I only
meant that the world outside of ietf seems to be taking
on a lot of these issues without ietf's advice and consent.
Mike, doesn't it strike others as odd
that ietf is completely outside of the
p2p bizness?
In this case, there is no advantage to the developer of the protocol to
have it worked on in the IETF, nor even published as an RFC. It came out
of one person's head, he was able to experiment with it live on the net,
and he retains the ability to tweak the specs whenever he feels like it.
It has worked remarkably well, given the variety of clients and servers
available for the protocol, and the huge amount of traffic that is moved
daily over it.
Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
old and in the way?
I'll note that many protocols -- good and bad -- spring from
somebody's head. Some of them become successful too. Very
successful. And ietf has no say about them at all. Is this
the new reality? Sure seems like it to me. Should we be
concerned? Might there be film at 11 at some point because
of it?
Mike, or is it too soon for another
ietf ossification thread?
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