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From: MRC%PANDA@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: GOSIP
Message-ID: <12285600801.8.MRC@PANDA>
Date: Wed, 11-Mar-87 15:20:48 EST
Article-I.D.: PANDA.12285600801.8.MRC
Posted: Wed Mar 11 15:20:48 1987
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     If OSI is to DoD the way a Lincoln Town Car is to an MGB,
I guess we'll be running DoD protocols for a long long time to
come.

     As a network programmer, I am delighted at the prospect of
full employment for everybody in my field for a very long time,
at US government expense.  As a taxpayer, I'm outraged, and am
starting to make comparisions in my mind with the Sgt. York and
the B-1.

     I am wondering if what we are seeing is OSI having become
so large and unmanagable that implementability has become a
forgotten goal.  I read the FTAM specification and still am not
completely sure what FTAM is all about.  "Eschew obfuscation"
seems to have been forgotten.

     More to the point; I don't think the US government should
be in the business of trying to establish OSI as a standard
protocol.  The current regime is big on "market" based decisions.
If the US government sees itself as a USER of an international
standard protocol but is otherwise neutral on what that protocol
should be, then the current de facto international standard is
TCP/IP.  If OSI is so wonderful, then all the other users of
network protocols -- industry, research, our foreign allies,
the socialist countries(!!) -- will migrate to OSI without US
government pressure being brought to bear.

     If OSI fails to gain such widespread acceptance, then
perhaps it was a bad idea to begin with.  Nobody is seriously
suggesting that TCP/IP should be retained indefinitely; what
we ARE saying is that there should not be *any* talk of
migration until there is clearly something better available.
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