Re: [hackathon] Open Source Software and network protocol standards

[Michael Tuexen <[e-mail]>]

> On 19. Mar 2022, at 00:47, Stuart Cheshire <cheshire=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Dear Hackathon crew!
> 
> I have a question about the relationship between Open Source Software and network protocol standards.
> 
> My intuition is that in recent years Open Source Software has had a significant impact on network protocol standards, both in the availability of easily accessible open implementations contributing to the success of network protocol standards, and, in contrast, the lack of easily accessible open implementations contributing to less success for those network protocol standards.
> 
> I suspect that many in the IETF Hackathon community share this intuition, but it would be interesting to back up that intuition with concrete data.
> 
> I’d like to build a list of compelling examples.
> 
> Can you think of cases where an Open Source Software implementation clearly helped a networking protocol become successful? Was that Open Source implementation driven by the people (or companies) actively working on the protocol standard? Or was it created by an independent community following the standards development process?
> 
Hi Stuart,

in the case of SCTP we always had in the past Open Source implementations available
when documents reached the WGLC. A lot of times it was the FreeBSD kernel implementation.
I really helped to understand if the specification is complete and allowed other
implementers to test against it.

Best regards
Michael