Re: The ecosystem is moving

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 3:52 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 5/13/2016 11:20 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]
>>     To date, we really only have two services that demonstrate open (ie,
>>     multi-administration) interoperability at Internet scale:  email and
>>     DNS.
>>
>>
>> TCP, IP, UDP, NFS, DHCP, TLS, SSH, FTP, HTTP, NNTP, SIP, ...
>>
>
>
> So, yes, I did intend my comment to be provocative and did suspect I was
> missing one or another service.  But I also messed up, by not making clear
> I was targeting open, /distributed/, /applications-level/ services. (And
> yes, for this kind of discussion, DNS is an application.)
>
> That is, I meant the qualifying test to be that there often is casual
> interoperability across a /sequence/ of independent administrations, and
> use by a very large fraction of the Internet.
>
> Alia's BGP reference was the biggest surprise -- thank you, Alia! --
> because I think it /does/ qualify and it hadn't occurred to me.
>
> The problem with all of the others cited above is that they aren't at used
> at scale or aren't really used with open, multi-hop interoperability.  Much
> of the list, above, is for lower-layer protocols.
>
> FTP and HTTP are simple, single-hop client/server mechanisms.  The latter
> is, of course, widely used, but it's a one-hop service.  (In reality, of
> course, the web has all sorts of additional hops, if one looks at content
> distribution, and other mechanisms, but they are behind the scenes and
> under tight control.)
>

And so will email when we fix it.

I don't think SMTP is a good model to follow. The core problem is that many
of the problems that should have been handled by support in the protocol
were implemented with ad hoc perl scripts performing store and forward.

So as a result mailing lists don't really work very well, security is
poorly integrated and there is an upper limit on message size.

The reason no other application meets Dave's criteria is that they are bad
criteria.