romkey@kaos.UUCP (John Romkey) (04/01/88)
In article <1017@thumper.bellcore.com> karn@thumper.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) writes: >Someday, perhaps there'll be a protocol standards organization >controlled completely by users. Realizing the importance of the process, >they will each invest sufficient time and money so that they can be >thoroughly versed with the technical issues. However, anyone associated >with a commercial vendor of products controlled by the standards in >question would be automatically disqualified from membership. I don't want to waste people's time with this, and I don't mean this as a flame, but I've got something to say in response here: Come on, Phil, there are some of us out here in vendor-land who have a lot of experience and can make valid contributions to protocol designs. There are a lot of differences between having years of experience working with (for instance) IP over serial lines and spending the money and time to read a book on serial lines and the relevant RFC's. There are maybe one or two other people out there (Jerry Saltzer, Dave Bridgham) who have as many years of experience as me with TCP/IP on IBM PC's. That's because we worked on the very first implementation on PC's (there were other people involved too, but none of them are still into TCP/IP and IBM PC's). I'm not saying here that there's no one out there who knows more about the subject than me, but when you work on something for six consecutive years, you usually learn a few tricks. I can contribute a lot to design issues in this area and others. Because I still have some tenuous connection with FTP Software, I don't think I should automatically be disaqualified from being involved. Some of us out here are capable of impartiality. I will usually place the best technical solution over monetary gain. There are a starting to be major contributions made to the TCP/IP protocol suite by vendors. If, for instance, a standards committee was formed to specify a standardized protocol for network shared filesystems, your rule would say no one from Sun (NFS is important) or AT&T (RFS shouldn't be completely ignored) could be on the committee, when there's a lot of talent and knowledge in this area in these companies. That seems like a very bad idea. In general, any rule that says "All X are Y" is wrong, or at least unfair, and yours was a rule like that. It doesn't build in any margin for special cases that don't fit. Of course, the rule says that the rule itself is wrong, too. -- - john romkey UUCP: romkey@kaos.uucp ARPA: romkey@xx.lcs.mit.edu ...harvard!spdcc!kaos!romkey Telephone: (617) 776-3121