--On Saturday, February 01, 2014 12:41 -0500 Hector Santos
<hsantos(_at_)isdg(_dot_)net> wrote:
Hi Chris,
How does the IETF feel about having "multiple standards" of
the same thing, in other words, redundancy?
I don't think we generally want that, and I don't think we
want "bad" ideas becoming standards because it becomes harder
and costly to undue.
However, we do need to document them too as well to allow
people to try them out. So if the authors don't wish to make
it, EXPERIMENTAL, BCP or INFORMATIONAL, a better option is to
further it as a Proposed Method rather than get bounce around,
wasting so much time as a Proposed Standard where Rough
...
Hector,
While "proposed method" may be better terminology, this most
recent explanation sounds to me as if you are reinvention what
"Proposed Standard" was supposed to be, with "real"
standardization (and recommendations about adoption, non-test
deployment, and use) coming only with "Draft Standard". Sadly
that hasn't worked for many years. One could debate whether it
ever really worked consistently.
From observations of a number of standards bodies that do work
in so-called "high technology" areas (not just networking), part
of the problem is that companies are most likely to send
design-level engineers with real product involvement to meetings
when the technology is still new and being designed. Once there
is a design and organizations have made a commitment to
production-quality implementations, deployment, aales and
marketing, or operations, the tendency is for those the time of
those design-level engineers to be considered too valuable to
spend on standardization and participation shifts toward those
whose roles have more to do with protecting company interests,
worrying about process rather than technology details, and doing
the kind of fine-tuning and second-guessing that are often
described in terms of second (or third) system effects.
That pattern is independent of whatever one calls the first
stage in the process -- the folks with the most design knowledge
and experience participate actively early-on (if at all) and
things evolve after that toward professional standardizers over
time.
The IETF has been much more successful than average at avoiding
or minimizing that pattern (although I think we are worse at it
than we were a few decades ago when Internet fundamentals were
still being designed and tested). But the tendencies are there
and I think it is extremely unlikely that fiddling around with
names will have little lasting effect.
best,
john