[ih] GOSIP & compliance

[Bob Purvy]

I'm happy to say that I benefited hugely from this "only the intersection
of everyone's lists" philosophy when the RDBMS MIB working group came along
in late 1993.

Marshall Rose was our advisor, and as the Oracle rep I had the honor of
chairing it. Every major database company was in on it, and somehow or
other, mostly by chanting that mantra, we got RFC 1697 out in July 1994, if
memory serves.

There were all kinds of requests for additional features, but we always won
by saying "let's get this first version out, and then deal with that."
There were never any later versions, btw. Oracle implemented it; I don't
know if any other vendors did. I think Ingres and Informix did, but I'm not
sure.

*One point no one's brought up that bears mentioning*: I always played
heavily on the participants' desire to get *done*, tell their boss that
they succeeded, and not tie up the company's resources forever. In the
"official" standards bodies, you can draw full-time standards politicians
who don't have any other job. IETF drew people who actually did work.

On Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 9:08 AM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
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>