OpenSource promotes innovation. Fortunately, innovative OpenSource
solutions that define their own standards where none currently exist
often spark an interest in the industry toward accepting the OpenSource
solution as a standard. Likewise, OpenSource solutions are often "proof
of concept" reference implementations of standards approved by standards
bodies. If you see an IETF draft whitepaper, there's a good bet that
someone has some OpenSource skeleton somewhere that implements that
protocol idea.
Standards bodies typically work to gain industry acceptance of unified
technologies through extensive committees and political bargaining. How
else would ATM cells have 48 byte payloads? Patented technologies are
often woven into standards insuring the prosperity of member companies.
One merely needs to look at RAMBUS to see what evil things they did to
JEDEC.
Sometimes, standards bodies are started purely out of necessity. My
previous employer found themselves working with various ATM equipment
vendors trying to get VoATM (Voice over ATM) working with SVC speech
bearer channels, only to find that the ATM standards were woefully
inadequate and vague. We fought to establish "The Alta Group" to further
the "Alta Spec" to clarify the specifics regarding SVC bearer VoATM and
other associated issues.
One of the results of this, however, was our need to subscribe to a
number of standards organizations to have full run of ITU-T, Bellcore,
IETF, IEEE, and other specs as we needed them to enforce vendor
compliance. It's rather amazing what vendors try to get away with if you
don't corner them with a standards spec and get them to admit the error
in their ways.
Solid Engineering practices depend on a solid foundation of standards
specs to really develop solutions to problems correctly.
Sadly, looking at Freshmeat or Sourceforge, Opensource projects are more
often than not developed at the whim of the author for a specific
purpose that either benefit few others or are written so narrowly as to
avoid the real engineering problems that would otherwise need to be
addressed.
Yes, OpenSource is innnovation, but the hard work of compatibility,
interoperability, and integration testing for larger systems just seems
to be the last thing on most OpenSource developers minds. OpenSource is
usually developed on top of standards, with an eye toward defining new
standards often at the expense of legacy software platforms.
Coders like to "rewrite" things. Developers like to "reuse" things. I
honestly believe that most OpenSource is written by youthful coders and
not developers.
- Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net> <ian@blenke.com>
http://ian.blenke.com
On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 09:17, Frank Roberts - SOTL wrote:
> Hi All:
>
> I know that this has nothing to do with Linux as such but then again it sure
> does make one appreciate Linux.
>
> Back when I was studying electrical engineering computers hardware and
> software were part of circuits. Computers were composed of discrete
> components and programed in assembly language. Standards for all electrical
> apparatus including computers was and still is maintained by the IEEE.
>
> I just attempted to purchase a set of standards from the IEEE.
>
> Full set one person $4000.
> Industry specific group (approximately 10% of total) $1500.
> Individual standards $60 to $600 each.
>
> Now one must realize the IEEE cost of the standards is the same as the Linus
> comunity cost of "How to" documents and "Man Pages" and have the same
> relation to other electrical devices as these do to Linux. As far as cost
> what ever cost that was incurred was bore by the individuals composing the
> standards not the organization.
>
> With cost like this for basic services one can only wonder why one should
> maintain a membership.
>
> Frank
>
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