Archive for the ‘standards’ tag
Open Standards, Open Source, Open Loop
Dave Ward (Chief Architect at Cisco) gave an interesting lunch talk on the relationship between Open Standards and Open Source Software at IETF-91 today. Technologies such as OpenFlow and NFV are increasingly being advanced through Open Source Software projects that develop both individual components as well as larger systems. The developed artifacts are sometimes being referred to as de-facto standards.
Dave gave some perspectives on how Open Source Software can help to speed up collaborative technology development and related this to standards work in the IETF and other bodies. Dave emphasized the importance of Open Standards for the development of Internet technologies but he pointed out that Open Standards can leverage Open Source to speed up specification development and to validate architecture and protocol specifications.
The talk suggested embracing Open Source Software development for standards work in the IETF, pointing at new working models and skill sets that were required for that.
Obviously, the IETF has always had a focus on running code for validating specification and several recent efforts have been leveraging OSS succesfully -- for example CORE, DTN and many others. Still, there was agreement that there is room for extending and potentially institutionalizing this.