On 11 okt 2011, at 22:53, Ross Callon wrote: >> I didn't mean to say that the IETF in general allows multiple solutions but I think >> it is accurate to say that the IETF has a less than 100% success rate of preventing >> multiple solutions. > > Correct. We are not perfect. I had four "proposals" for chat protocols when I was Apps AD. One of them was NOT XMPP which now later seems to be what people use. My take is that: - If there is one proposal for a standard, it is "enough" for that proposal to be "technically sound" - If there are two proposals (or more), i.e. a situation where the market is to choose between the multiple proposals that more or less solve the same problem, there is an additional constraint, and that is that the proposals do not interfere with each other So if one have more than one proposal on the table that all move forward, they must be technically sound AND also not interfere with each other. This 2nd requirement is something that is not as easy to resolve as people might think. And specifically (we see in the MPLS case), the "bandwidth" of the liaison connection between SDOs is not high enough to guarantee this. We learned that the hard way between W3C and IETF. Because of that the liaison coordination is only to resolve what SDO is managing the multiple proposals. It can not handle the synchronization between proposals. And this to me is a key issue the whole MPLS discussion. It is just plain wrong to try to manage all variants of multiple flavors of ice-cream across SDOs. And why I strongly have the view I have on what has gone wrong. Patrik _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf