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Re: netwrk stuff

2006-07-21 15:06:42


Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 12:06 AM -0700 7/21/06, Dave Crocker wrote:
By way of providing some incentive, I suggest that Proposed have a limit,
such as 3 or 5 years (and, yes, we can quibble about that, too.) If the 
work cannot gain sufficient adoption by the end of that time, it has failed
and warrants moving to Historic.

Fully disagree. If there is "some implementation but not enough" it
should remain "proposed". Otherwise, vendors will hesitate to implement
protocols that might eventually make them look silly ("why does the box
include the FrobzBaz protocol when everyone knows that it is Historic?").

That sounds like an extremely reasonable concern, except for all the empirical
evidence to the contrary.

Vendors do not look silly by being aggressive in providing new features.

And they take risks about the future, formal approval and market-wide acceptance
of a technology all the time.


This leads to two designations: Proposed and Full. An implementer
looking at a Proposed standard would assess how long it has been out and
which other implementers have put it in competing products to assess
whether they want to put it in theirs. Things labelled Full standard
would probably be put in by default.

So, we are in agreement about having 2 levels and having the second one be based
on market acceptance?  Our disagreement is about deprecating Proposed specs that
have not reached Full after a period of time.

Note that we already have this policy, although it applied erratically by the
decade, not mechanically by the year.

ALso as you worry about incentives, note that automatic deprecation provides an
incentive for those asserting community need to prove it and to do the proving
in a timely fashion.  (What specifications have failed to gain significant
adoption after, say, 5 years but have, nonetheless, become "successful"?)


Vendors really do care about this. They don't want to look bad for
including the "wrong" features, and they don't want to look bad for not
including popular ones. 

I've never seen one that was faulted for having extra features, no matter their
"formal" status.


I regularly get calls from VPNC members asking
about whether or not they should implement various standards, both in
the positive sense ("is it worth paying an OEM to include this?") and in
the negative sense ("will we look silly if we include this, even though
it is in the standard?").

The best I can guess is that anyone worrying about looking silly, for having
extra features, probably is new to the marketing game or is hopelessly naive
about their product space.

d/

-- 

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

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