SIGNAL POSTED BY carl | 07.16.02 @ 06:28 AM Spread the Slash Slash (dot)  [ FILED UNDER: BEEP » Incidents » ]

A (fairly) recent piece on /. asked why the (not quite) new effort by the IETF to standardize BEEP didn't appear to be taking off.

A reasonable question which elicited (some) reasonable commentary and (some) dubious grandstanding. Given the 15 nanoseconds of fame this feature provided to BEEP (and the load average of 15 it gave to beepcore.org), it seemed appropriate to provide (even more) commentary.

A father of HTTP (like the Internet, HTTP is the son of an monotonically increasing number of fathers) posted one of the most interesting statements:

"BEEP's main proponent, Marshall Rose was one of the main wheels in the OSI project. So much of the initial buzz came from his name alone. People were talking about the protocol before they read the drafts (oh yes that is normal for the IETF)."

Let's do a little parsing here. An accurate description of Marshall's role in OSI was that of the monkey wrench. As Marshall said in his reply to Dad, he gave a famous speech on November 4th, 1993 which so struck those in attendance that ballads were written about it. His speech was the nail in the coffin for OSI's chances to be the Internet protocol.

And, while much credibility came from Marshall's name (having authored a few RFCs, some of the credibility might be considered well-deserved), there was no initial buzz since we kept a tight clamp on our marketing droids during the roll-out. Some of the credibility might have been the result of the fact that we asked a protocol review board consisting of Tim Bray, David Clark, David Crocker, Steve Deering, Paul Mockapetris, and Paul Vixie to give us a reality check before the drafts were submitted to the IETF. I don't think you can do a better job of quality assurance than that crowd.

As to whether or not BEEP is taking off, a pretty good reality check is the fact that there is a new O'Reilly book on BEEP, 5 RFCs, and a series of interesting Internet-Drafts.