Subject: Re: Call for Comments: What Makes For a Successful Protocol?

From: "Tim Bray" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:07:48 -0700

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:11 AM, IAB Chair <[email-masked]> wrote:
>    What Makes For a Successful Protocol?
>        draft-iab-protocol-success-03
>
>  as an informational RFC.Before doing so the IAB wants to solicit from
>  the community any last comments on this document.
...
>  The document can be found at:
>  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-protocol-success-03.txt

The first illustration in section 1.2.1 is misleading.  The narrative
about the success of HTTP is correct, but the selection of "VPN" and
"Firewall traversal" for inclusion is troubling.  To start with, I
don't see why VPN is included at all, and there's no explanatory text.
 Second, it seems to me that perhaps the most interesting/important
success for HTTP outside its original design space is in software
integration in general and "Web Services" in particular.  As for
firewall traversal... while accurate, this is not something that the
IETF is very comfortable with.

A.1.1 "HTML encumbrance only surfaced later".  What HTML encumbrance?
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---

From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:45:57 +0200 (EET)

> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-protocol-success-03.txt

The document seems to be in good shape and is useful.

Two comments:

Case study A4 discusses inter-domain multicast vs application 
overlays.  It seems as if the text is focused on inter-domain _ASM_ 
multicast; some of the facts stated do not apply to SSM.  I'm not sure 
what would be the best course here: rephrase the case study to be 
about ASM multicast or generalize slightly.

Case study A7 discusses radius vs tacacs+.  As a historical point, 
tacacs+ 2.1 from 1995 [1] had a very non-explicit boilerplate [2] and 
it's not obvious if there were any real restrictions to using it.  I 
don't remember anymore if there was something more to it but I 
certainly used :-).

In later versions, (4.0.4 from 1998) [3], the license was more 
explicit and pretty much like the old BSD license.

From that perspective, unless I'm missing something, it seems as if 
tacacs+ had open code and was more or less restriction-free.

[1]
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.wiretapped.net/pub/security/authentication/tacacs/tac_plus.2.1.tar.gz

[2]
  * Copyright (c) 1995 by Cisco systems, Inc.
  * All rights reserved.

  * Please NOTE:  None of the TACACS code available here comes with any
  * warranty or support.

[3]
ftp://ftp-eng.cisco.com/pub/tacacs/obsolete/

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
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