Hostility towards the IETF [LWN.net]

Hostility towards the IETF

Posted May 3, 2007 22:17 UTC (Thu) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886)
In reply to: Hostility towards the IETF by pflugstad
Parent article: IPv6 source routing: history repeats itself

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.

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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.