Re: Comments from Christian H. on LDAP

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

Steve,

We obviously disagree with the importance of keeping the name service
compatible with OSI-X.500, which you describe as "the whole world". After
playing in this field for quite a long time, I believe that OSI is now doomed
and is just collapsing under its own weight.

If one buy's that line, the next think to do is to try to salvage a few OSI
jewels out of the wreck. Such jewels, IMHO, include ASN.1 and also X.500 --
although X.500 has to be fixed in at least one aspect, i.e. by "removing" the
correlation between navigation and naming hierarchy. Thus, the next think to
do would be to make a light weight version of the DSP, and possibly unify it
with LDAP in order to obtain a reasonable "Internet white page service" that
would reuse large chunks of the X.500 technology -- and working codes. Note
that there is an alternative, i.e. to observe the development of an entirely
different competing technology like "whois++", which may result in a situation
where X.500 would have about as much future as X.400 (who would deploy X.400
now that MIME is available?).

Obviously, *you* do not believe that OSI is doomed. Otherwise, you would not
have founded a company to sell OSI products! This will not be the first time
that we differ.

Christian Huitema