Kent M Pitman  <pitman@nhplace.com> wrote:
+---------------
| The reason for that is, when you peel it back, partly antitrust law.
| Standards are consensus-making bodies, but standards-making bodies are
| phobic of creating standards that create huge amounts of cost to
| someone affected while not creating equivalent cost to others, since
| this can put one business out of business.  
+---------------

Unfortunately, I fear this is part of the reason that in networking
standards, for example, beginning roughly about the beginning of
the FDDI standardization process, standards bodies stopped allowing
themselves to standardize "best existing practice" [which had been
the previous expectation and practice, such as for the standards
for HIPPI, Ethernet, and IEEE-488], and instead insisted on only
considering *brand-new* designs [such as FDDI] that no-one had ever
implemented yet, in order to ensure "maximal mutual disadvantage"
[my term for it] among all of the competing parties. As a result,
we've ended up with monstrosities such as FDDI, ATM, InfiniBand, etc.
(*Feh!*)


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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