Several open source software organizations are remarkable. Not little remarkable, big remarkable. As in they show us how alternative models to the typical corporate business model may well be far superior as a way for people to collaborate. For the most part these remarkable are unknown. I have used Debian for (ahem) a very long time without knowing much about the organization and this article was a very good introduction.
I have been aware of the IETF for quite a while. What is most amazing is that the internet today was built (more-or-less) by the IETF. See The Tao of IETF (https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/). This is an organization with no members. It just works. Hardly anyone really knows about it.
Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.509.
The question that comes to my mind is whether these kind of democratic type collaborative organizations are in fact superior (far superior?) to the traditional corporate model. I personally have watched many corporations act with obvious stupidity. Doing things that can only be described as severely fight-their-way-out-of-a-paper-bag challenged. To put it kindly.
Certainly these other-style organizations do not really stack up on an economic basis. The income of most corporations dwarfs that of both the IETF and Debian. And yet as a contributor and creator, I can ask Cuo Bono? Certainly not the contributors, they subsist.
And perhaps most interesting to me, and perhaps worth an experiment, is whether it is possible to use an IETF or Debian style model that competes with the corporate model. It did work once with the Protocol Wars, so maybe.
> Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.509.
I would not describe it as 'corporate world decided to compete with IETF', than 'governments tried to enforce its power'. IETF working groups are often full of engineers from corporate vendors trying to collaborate to ensure interoperability, while ISO is traditional top-down governments-led organization.
You are correct. A better way to put it. And it is true that the IETF working groups are often from corporate vendors.
So perhaps that part of my argument is completely wrong. And distracts from the main question: could other fundamental models of collaboration be significantly more productive (efficient) than corporate models?
not entirely. I was involved in the IETF in the early 90s. At that time the old guard were the sort of second wave of internet designers (Clark, Estrin, Zhang, Cerf, Deering, Jacobsen....not going to pretend to list everyone). They primary worked off of (D)ARPA grants, although some of them them did work at places like Parc, and certainly places like Cisco.
during that time, alot more money was being dumped into this internet thing, and companies realized that if they could get their widget written into internet standards, it would be really good for business.
partially due to that, and partially due to a largely ineffective focus on multicast protocols (PIM, RSVP, etc.), these people became less central over time, and alot of the formative protocol design activity stopped.
just my perspective, but it seems odd that we're still largely stuck in the early 90s protocol-wise. clearly there have been some changes (http3, bar), but not really much considering the relative timespans.
in any case, the point being that corporate involvement in the IETF wasn't a given in the early days, and it hasn't been an unqualified win.
yeah. there are plenty of reasons. I do think the shift to the client(nat)/server(default-free) model did alot of damage. ATM was also a huge suckhole that killed momentum. and I think ISP just stopped listening to what the ietf had to say for the most part.
I have been aware of the IETF for quite a while. What is most amazing is that the internet today was built (more-or-less) by the IETF. See The Tao of IETF (https://www.ietf.org/about/participate/tao/). This is an organization with no members. It just works. Hardly anyone really knows about it.
Just as interesting is what happened when the corporate world decided to compete with the IETF for control of how the internet worked. Some people call this the protocol wars. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Wars). For a while it seemed like each month the OSI would announce a project to replace parts of the internet, like TCP, with an X.protocol. Of these efforts very few survived and thrived - like X.509.
The question that comes to my mind is whether these kind of democratic type collaborative organizations are in fact superior (far superior?) to the traditional corporate model. I personally have watched many corporations act with obvious stupidity. Doing things that can only be described as severely fight-their-way-out-of-a-paper-bag challenged. To put it kindly.
Certainly these other-style organizations do not really stack up on an economic basis. The income of most corporations dwarfs that of both the IETF and Debian. And yet as a contributor and creator, I can ask Cuo Bono? Certainly not the contributors, they subsist.
And perhaps most interesting to me, and perhaps worth an experiment, is whether it is possible to use an IETF or Debian style model that competes with the corporate model. It did work once with the Protocol Wars, so maybe.
(edit to remove markdown syntax, sigh)