Hostility towards the IETF [LWN.net]

Hostility towards the IETF

Posted May 3, 2007 16:45 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
In reply to: IPv6 source routing: history repeats itself by Gunner
Parent article: IPv6 source routing: history repeats itself

I think a lot of the hostility towards the IETF is because it _used to be_ the place to go to do real technical standardization work, including developing new protocols and fixing problems; with (hopefully) little or no politics involved

Then 1995 happened, and the Internet became big business, and the IETF has since been infested with commercial/competing interesting and has fallen afoul of most other technical standards bodies. Just look at all the crap that OSI/ITU/etc has issued over the years, almost all of which is irrelevant and unimplementable. Witness the insanity of ISDN (or pick any of a dozen other "standardized" protocols that really weren't).

So I think the hostility is mainly from those who remember the "Good old days" of the IETF. We want the IETF to be the technology leader it was perceived to be when the Internet protocols were created (TCP/IP) - with the clarity and technical focus that it used to have.

I think Paul Vixie nailed it on the head when he said that the IETF was no longer relevant: Open Source software has become the way to meet the the implementation requirements for the IETF, and as such, it basically sets the standard. All the IETF really does at this point is rubber stamp what the open source software is actually implementing, maybe with a little formalization thrown in to make things more orthogonal, but that's about it.

Anyway, my 2 cents...

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Hostility towards the IETF

Posted May 3, 2007 22:17 UTC (Thu) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886) [Link]

Open Source software has become the way to meet the the implementation requirements for the IETF, and as such, it basically sets the standard.

Open Source isn't the first to set standards by writing code that then becomes standard. Just look at the old proprietary Unixes and Microsoft. Yes, Open Source makes it a little bit better, but it would surely be better still to work with the IETF to develop the standards before, or possibly with, the code.

Hostility towards the IETF

Posted May 10, 2007 10:19 UTC (Thu) by slamb (guest, #1070) [Link]

Yes, Open Source makes it a little bit better, but it would surely be better still to work with the IETF to develop the standards before, or possibly with, the code.

No, that would be a disaster. Stuff like CWMP happens when you standardize too early - protocols with many flawed ideas that become obvious when you later reach the implementation stage. For example, CWMP's SOAP bindings are so messed up that no vendor is using standard libraries, which was the goal of using SOAP. If they'd waited to implementation stage, this would have been obvious.