[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Miles Fidelman]

Richard Bennett wrote:
> People bring proposals to standards bodies, who choose among them, 
> modify them, accept them and reject them. "Existing practices" in the 
> most interesting cases are confined to the lab or even to simulation 
> these days.

Which is distinctly different than bottom-up in the IETF sense.  The 
distinction isn't bottom-up vs. top-down, it's more one of 
semi-collaborative, get it right ("rough consensus and running code" so 
to speak) vs. vendor's battling out who's existing products will have to 
be modified when the standard gets finalized.

> I think you're making a false distinction between OSI and other 
> networking standards. OSI problem was mainly that it was not top-down 
> enough, had too many cooks, and had to offer too many options to 
> achieve consensus.
And that comes back to the lack of a bottom-up process that emphasized 
running code.  My impression of the OSI work was that it was way too 
theoretical and political.

There are real lessons to be learned here.  I see a lot of the same 
dynamics in today's geospatial standards work through the OGC - lot's of 
theoretical wrangling, resulting in standards that sort of work, but 
have to be fixed in later revisions, and that largely get ignored by 
most of the world (take a look at how many people use ESRI's proprietary 
stuff, vs. Google's APIs, vs. OGC standard WMS and WFS; or maybe look at 
the rapid adoption of RESTful intefaces vs. W3C web service standards).

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra