Subject: Re: [arch-d] Systems theory: The IETF "addicted" to "symptomatic solutions" aka "point solutions"?

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 12:40:12 -0500 (EST)

> From: John Day <[email-masked]>

[Skip a bunch of stuff I agree with]

    >> The Tuba designers couldn't get the CLNP community to sign on to TUBA
    >> "because we have deployed base already, even though there's very
    >> little of it in total, and this subset of CLNP is incompatible with
    >> that base". Now we hear "we can't make what are obviously badly-needed
    >> changes to IPv6 because we already have some deployed base, although
    >> it's really very small, and this is incompatible with that base".

    > Isn't that rationale (both then and now) just doublespeak for "I am
    > holding out because I still believe my position will finally win"? ;-)

Yes and no.

I mean, I don't think their thought train was simply "this will succeed just
the way it is, so who needs to make changes". I think they really were
concerned about installed base - but at the same time, they had to have been
thinking "this will succeed just the way it is", because if the choice is
between a) making changes, and b) total failure, most people will go with a).

    >>  I would call them the new ISO.

    > I will have to disagree, ... You saw it from the outside. I was there.
    > ... by 1980, OSI had 3 major poles pulling it in very different and
    > incompatible directions. ... it ended up being two incompatible
    > architectures. OSI's destruction was seeded entirely by its own
    > internal contradictions.

Actually, we don't disagree, because I wasn't explicit enough: I wasn't
speaking of the processes/environments which created the ISO stack and IPv6,
which I agree with you are not similar (the dynamics which created IPv6 were
very different).

Rather, I was thinking of i) the attitude of the respective communities to
deployment (which seemed in both cases to have a strong flavour of an arrogant
"we built it, therefore they will come, the competition is beneath our notice"
- until it was too late), and ii) in particular detail, of resistance to
change to increase the chances of success.

    > The PTTs were going to do all they could to protect their status quo
    > and were not going to allow the kind of results that would have allowed
    > a clean effective break.

Although that part sounds familiar! :-) (Some of us wanted a radically
different kind of network at the internetworking layer - one, oddly enough,
which would have been a *perfect* fit for today's highly-optical systems.
Nimrod virtual links for traffic aggregates map perfectly onto lamda-switched
paths... but I digress.)

    > Had the ISO OSI developed alone there is a good chance that significant
    > progress would have been made and been visible to the outside world. As
    > it was, progress was made, but it so piled up with PTT garbage that you
    > had to know where to look.

Alas, not sure I can even say that about this case...

    > to have the IETF involved in developing a new architecture is much more
    > like OSI inviting the phone companies to participate. There is far too
    > much vested interested in status quo to allow another consensus group
    > to make a clean break and do what needs to be done. 

Yes and no. In the particular case of routing, I don't think it's so much
"vested interests", as something even simpler: people understand how the
current thing works, and the new stuff is just a little too wierd and
unfamiliar and "have to unscrew your head and screw it on again sideways".

Yes, at the edges, that can turn into vested interests ("I know how to tweak
Cisco configs to make it do traffic engineering the way we want"), but I
think for most people the wierd/unfamiliar thing is bigger. Particularly
because they are so deep in alligators they don't have the spare energy/
cycles/etc to think of doing something radically new.

And with that, we have cycled back to Pekka's original post in this
subthread...

	Noel

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