On Tue, 16 Apr 2002 17:48:03 EDT, John Stracke <jstracke@incentivesystems.com> said: > >IS-IS as deployed on the Internet is an interesting case. It is clearly > >open and is not proprietary, but as you point out there is no complete > >specification. I don't think we have a term for this combination :-) > > Yes, we do: "proprietary". It's a jargon term for standards development; > looking in a standard English dictionary won't help. It just means "not > open". No, the problem with IS-IS is that the spec *IS* 100% open, including the non-existent parts. As a literary analogy, if Don Knuth were to place his 5-volume set into the public domain, you'd still have a hard time implementing the algorithms in volume 5....