From: Erik Naggum <enag@ifi.uio.no>
Organization: Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Date: 27 Sep 1992 02:13:02 +0200
Subject: Re: ISO specs.
Summary: OSI is geared towards larger entities than TCP/IP, which can be
	 mastered by a diligent student or an independent consultant.

Phil Royse <proyse@peeras.demon.co.uk> writes:
|
|   Yes, Erik, and this will have the natural effect of limiting the
|   flow of OSI information, knowledge and awareness etc. etc.  As a
|   comms consultant I need access to masses of essentially tutorial
|   information to increase my ongoing knowledge.  I do not write code
|   nor "implement" standards.  I develop comms & networking strategies
|   for clients, mostly in the public sector.  I write procurement specs
|   for big LANs (e.g. 1800 outlets), and advise on LAN & WAN protocols
|   and the approach to be taken to integrate complicated mixes on
|   systems (VAXs, ICL VME, RS6000, big NetWare sites etc), when we need
|   to start considering FDDI, frame relay.  Applicability of X.25
|   networks, comparison of protocol services, network management etc.

... so one hour of your time is worth weeks and months if they should do
it themselves, right?  Are you selling your services too cheaply?

:
|   At these prices, the full set of standards would run into many
|   hundreds of UK pounds.  And I repeat, many of us need these for
|   tutorial and reference purposes.

Look, who do you think you're talking to?  I own ISO and CCITT standards
worth more than an high-end 1000 cc motorcycle, which, come to think of
it, I'd much rather have invested in if I had known then what I do now.

Besides, you only prove ISO's point: Why should they give you things
which you can use to obtain knowledge, expertise, and the ability to
reap future income from your consulting work?  Consider how many hours
of communications consulting work you need to do to pay for them,
compared to how many hours of work of study you need to put into them,
and the costs all but vanish.  (At least mine do.)

I think the crucial point here is that the investment you think is
large, is less than it would cost a large company to give you an office
space with a computer and network connection.  When you have enough
money to spend a couple years on research and expect to break even in
another couple years, ISO documents aren't expensive compared to the
other costs involved.  It's only when you pay for those ISO standards
out of your food and rent budget that you feel the suck in your wallet.
This networking world is so well suited to lone rangers and other hired
guns that it's very much different from the corporate world.

Another thing to remember is that standards are often held by large
public libraries, and specialized libraries.  I have been able to access
random standards by visiting the Norwegian Telecom's library (they're
very friendly), by spending weeks (literally) in the offices of the
Norwegian ISO member body, by trolling for standards and tutorial works
in the on-line library data base for all University libraries.  If I had
known what to look for, and we assume a cost of each hour spent of about
1/7 of what I charge, it would still make lots of sense to buy all of
them...

|   Contrast this position with the freedom of access to RFCs....

Hah!  What freedom?  Freedom of access, but only if you were already
connected.  Five years ago, this was not an easy job, and it has been
far from free.  If you, as a communications consultant should get
Internet access or e-mail access to these documents, you would pay
through your nose for telecommunication services, too.  That's _my_
biggest cost, by almost an order of magnitude.

|   From my PC in my office at home I can FTP onto Imperial College in
|   London (src.doc.ic.ac.uk), download any RFC and have it printed in
|   less time than it would take me to walk to my archive department
|   (the garage).

Man, you've got a fast printer. :-)

My printer, btw, has a page cost of about 40% of that of a published
(large) ISO document, and three times that of a CCITT published page.  I
would hate to print 25,000 pages on it, to put it that way.  Besides, I
like the better binding (!) and paper quality of published standards,
and especially the good printing quality of CCITT recommendations (which
keep my shelf space down to one about half of what normal laser-printer
paper would require).  Your comparison doesn't scale well, in my view.

|   Whilst this situation prevails, the quality of understanding, advice
|   technical knowledge and clear strategies will be higher for TC/IP
|   related issues than for OSI.

... unless you take part in the development process, of course, or
expect to make tons of monetas selling conforming products, in which
case the costs of acquisition approach a relative zero.

|   Yes, the ISO's excercising of its copyright on standards is limiting
|   the speed with which OSI protocols will be taken up by the user
|   community.

That depends.  OSI is spreading faster than Internet protocols did with
the same distribution.  The Internet growth is approaching linear
growth, while we're only in the early exponential phase of OSI
protocols, still.  That means Internet protocols have a pure time
advantage it will take many years to overtake, but with the commercial
drive behind OSI, I would hedge my bets.  Our task, then, should be to
make OSI as close to Internet protocols as we can, and let the OSI folks
push our solutions.  Indeed, this is what we're seeing...

|   The question is: does it matter?

Yes.  Take part in the standards development, and get first-hand
information about the process, the new projects, the draft standards,
etc.  Trust me, this is _much_ less expensive than buying the final
standards, and you get to whine about them when it still matters.  Ex
post facto whining is _so_ pointless.

Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum             |  ISO  8879 SGML     |      +47 295 0313
                        |  ISO 10744 HyTime   |
<erik@naggum.no>        |  ISO 10646 UCS      |      Memento, terrigena.
<enag@ifi.uio.no>       |  ISO  9899 C        |      Memento, vita brevis.
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso,aus.net.directory,aus.net.directory.osi-ds