Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucivax!gateway
From: nazgul@alfalfa.COM (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: Is X.400 good for international mail?
Message-ID: <910109222323.4296@alphalpha>
Date: 11 Jan 91 00:03:11 GMT
References: <2792.663467594@nma>
Lines: 27
Approved: usenet@ICS.UCI.EDU
In-Reply-To: <2792.663467594@nma>
X-Mailer: Poste

> This OID would (ideally) be registered under some duly constituted
> Registration Authority, ONCE, and ONLY ONCE, but its OWNER, whoever that
> may be.  LOTUS owns its objects, and LOTUS owes it to its customers to
> register its object for carriage in X.400.
I assume that "but" means "by"?

This is certainly good in theory, however it is not all that easy
to call up some random company and tell them that they really need
to pay ANSI $1000, generate some OIDs (something which they've never
heard of) and then publicize them.  It's definitely the right way, but
it won't always work.  Furthermore, there are a large number of things
I'd like to mail which don't have owners, or at least not owners who
are going to get their own OID.  Take the PBM/PPM/PGM bitmap formats,
or the dozens of Tagged Interchange File Formats, etc..

We've already gone to some vendors and asked them about OIDS and the
response has been "What!?"  In that case it seems like the best thing
for us to do is contact the company, ask them if they have one, if they
don't, ask if they mind if we generate one for them, and then notify
them of it when we have.  Even this isn't great, because when you call
that company several months later you still aren't likely to find anyone
who knows what you're talking about, so some kind of informal database
on the Internet and elsewhere is probably a good idea too.

						-kee

(Please cc me, as I'm not on this list)