[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Miles Fidelman]

Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
> Or, to quote the IETF, "rough consensus and running code".
>   
Except that the reference is to the informal criteria for when one might 
even beginning to firm up a standard.  In the IETF community - unlike 
pretty much every other standards body on the planet - there's a pretty 
strong insistence that there are multiple implementations of something, 
that  an talk to each other, before even thinking about pinning down 
anything that looks like a standard.

Pretty much everybody associated with the IETF is funded by nice, large 
government contracts or has nice positions at large corporations, or 
both.  And pretty much all of the early code in and around the Internet 
(and the ARPANET) was written by people with DARPA and NSF grants (when 
they defined the TCP/IP protocol, Bob Kahn was either at BBN, my old 
stomping grounds, or at DARPA, and Vint Cerf was a professor at 
Stanford).  The original reference implementation of TCP/IP - which 
found it's way into an awful lot of different Unix variants - was 
written by folks at BBN, again, funded by DARPA.  Just read through the 
library of RFCs at www.ietf.org and you'll find that most of the authors 
have fairly serious organizational affiliations - they're doing the work 
as part of their day jobs.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.  Simply pointing out that leading 
edge software tends to be written by folks with solid institutional 
bases, and salaries, supporting them. 

Miles

-- 
Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs
Traverse Technologies 
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