Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
Or, to quote the IETF, "rough consensus and running code".
Except that the reference is to the informal criteria for when one might
even beginning to firm up a standard. In the IETF community - unlike
pretty much every other standards body on the planet - there's a pretty
strong insistence that there are multiple implementations of something,
that an talk to each other, before even thinking about pinning down
anything that looks like a standard.
Pretty much everybody associated with the IETF is funded by nice, large
government contracts or has nice positions at large corporations, or
both. And pretty much all of the early code in and around the Internet
(and the ARPANET) was written by people with DARPA and NSF grants (when
they defined the TCP/IP protocol, Bob Kahn was either at BBN, my old
stomping grounds, or at DARPA, and Vint Cerf was a professor at
Stanford). The original reference implementation of TCP/IP - which
found it's way into an awful lot of different Unix variants - was
written by folks at BBN, again, funded by DARPA. Just read through the
library of RFCs at www.ietf.org and you'll find that most of the authors
have fairly serious organizational affiliations - they're doing the work
as part of their day jobs.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Simply pointing out that leading
edge software tends to be written by folks with solid institutional
bases, and salaries, supporting them.
Miles
--
Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs
Traverse Technologies
145 Tremont Street, 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02111
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
617-395-8254
www.traversetechnologies.com
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