[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Dave Crocker]

On 3/19/2022 7:59 AM, Clem Cole via Internet-history wrote:
> *IP vs. OSI    -- "**Simple Economics always beats Sophisticated Design"*


This is certainly an appealing saying, and it might even be true. 
Sometimes.

But it does not describe the core reason OSI failed and TCP/IP 
succeeded.  By the time this saying was relevant, TCP/IP had already won 
the war.  Rather, this saying merely describes coming to the recognition 
of which won.

That real core was more like: "simple, operational technology always 
beats elaborate, incomplete, dysfunctional technology".

OSI was /not/ sophisticated design.  It was cumbersome /over/-design.

The reference to TCP vs. TP4 is an example of missing the point, since 
there was a mess of other TPs, for use depending on what the underlying 
networking technology was.

For the Lynch & Rose 1993 book, Internet System Handbook, I did a 
chapter about Internet technical processes, which prompted my 
considering differences between Internet and OSI processes.  (I had some 
limited experience in the OSI realm.)

Simply put, I believe the two communities did not differ in 
intelligence, knowledge or intent, but in pragmatics and a core bit of 
politics.  The OSI work required unanimity, which meant pleasing 
everyone, which meant including pretty much everything from everyone's 
various laundry lists.  This meant design took an extraordinarily long 
time, while tending to produce highly bloated specs.

In contrast, the TCP/IP community typically wanted something work by 
yesterday, which mean using only the intersection of everyone's lists. 
That produced smaller designs, with an implicit basis for knowing what 
was included would be useful.

A revised version of that chapter was published as Making Standards the 
IETF Way
<https://bbiw.net/ietf/ietf-stds.html>
1993, Association for Computing Machinery [Reprinted from StandardsView, 
Vol. 1, No. 1.

There were, of course, a number of other differences that probably had a 
large effect, including meetings (open vs. closed), primary venue 
(online vs. f2f), and document access (free vs. charged).


d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net