Re: inquiry re. the state of protocol R&D

["Carlos M. Martinez" <[e-mail]>]

A world of APIs is a good thing. As long as the APIs are public and well
documented and, well, standardized.

I believe this is an evolutionary step. After you get a solid foundation
of interoperable IP and transport protocols, the next logical step is to
standardize APIs.

What lies behind the API is bound to be propietary, IMO.

cheers!

~Carlos

On 5/24/14, 1:24 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> For a while, it's been kind of bugging me that the Internet ecosystem is
> increasingly a world of API's tied to proprietary systems - quite
> different than the world of interoperable protocols.  Sure, every once
> in a while something new comes along - like RSS and XMPP, but that's
> more at the fringes - and in a lot of cases we see attempts at things by
> folks who really don't have a clue (open social comes to mind). (And, of
> course, very specific things like, say DMARC.)
> 
> Obviously, a lot of this is driven by commercial factors - there's money
> to be made in centralizing systems and monetizing APIs; not so much for
> protocols.  And it seems like there isn't a lot of R&D funding for such
> things.
> 
> Which leads me to wonder - is there much of a protocol r&d community
> left - academic or otherwise?  IRTF seems awfully narrowly focused - and
> mostly at lower layers of the protocol stack.  Where's the work on
> application protocols (beyond refinements to HTTP, and web service
> stuff)?  Are there still funders for this kind of work?
> 
> If so, where do folks "congregate?"  For programming languages, there's
> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/, conferences like OOPSLA, and there
> seems to be a steady stream of academic papers.  Is there anything left
> like that for protocol R&D?
> 
> Miles Fidelman
>