[ih] Who starts with standards? (was Re: IETF relevance)

[Andrew Sullivan]

[ObDislcaimer: speaking only for myself and not the host of this list.]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 12:47:35PM -0400, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history wrote:
>Traditionally, protocols have never "originated" with the IETF

Without wishing to be cheeky, why would anyone start with a standard and try to work outwards from there?  If you don't at least have a prototype or a scratch proposal, you will spend the first 8 years arguing about the size of the problem and the next 8 regretting that you didn't ship any products.

I think this is true even when something goes through an entirely radical shift when being standardized.  The most obvious example of this recently was SPDY, which begat QUIC in the IETF.  There were probably things that shifted in QUIC that didn't need to, because some IETFer wanted to show just how high on the fence-post he (I use the pronoun advisedly) could hit; but on the whole, we got a broadly-useful protocol that has the potential to make positive contributions to the network.  But its ancestor had already been deployed at some scale when it came to the IETF.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca