On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 02:43 , Christian Huitema wrote: > Fine, but Randy is also right when he points out that just because a > spec is not an IETF standard does not mean that the spec is proprietary. Christian, As deployed IS-IS is not fully documented *anyplace*. What is actually deployed is not the same as ISO IS-IS, nor is it the same as RFC-1195, nor are those 2 documents (and a few other more recent RFCs) sufficient to create an interoperable IS-IS. Proprietary is a commonly used term to describe something that does not have a full, complete, and open specification -- which is the current state of IS-IS. Now folks (including me) are trying to fix that issue by publishing sundry non-standard RFCs on how the as-deployed IS-IS really works (which effort is to be applauded). But the bottom-line remains that *today* the as-deployed IS-IS and the documented IS-IS aren't the same. I wish they were. Now the original point was someone else's inaccurate claim that the IETF let both IS-IS and OSPF bloom, when really the IETF originally chose OSPF -- and IS-IS made a separate come-back in the deployed world during the mid-90s. Cheers, Ran rja@extremenetworks.com