Rant:Why Is the IEEE All About Secrecy ?

Why all the secrecy ?

My largest com­paint about the IEEE 802.1 body is that the most of the doc­u­ment is secret and locked behind pay­wall. For example, if we look at the 802.1aq stand­ard for Shortest Path Bridging at http://​www​.ieee802​.org/​1​/​p​a​g​e​s​/​8​0​2.1aq.html. The dis­pos­i­tions for the pro­gress of stand­ard are locked away for mem­bers only.

You can down­load and review the present­a­tions, but you can’t look at the status of the bal­lots or any of chi­canery that goes on between the vari­ous com­pan­ies. Because its not open the vendors are able to get up to all sorts of chi­canery. That what caused the 802.11 wire­less stand­ard to get delayed for years.

Open it up

If the IEEE is going to be an open stand­ards body, then it equally should be open so that every­one can watch com­pan­ies like Sun, Cisco and Brocade stab each other in the eye as they fight it out over stand­ards that will make them mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars in profit.

Alternately, they could be well behaved and show us all that they are really work­ing together. But we will never know that will we ?

Standard Committee mem­bers — its a dirty job

If you sit on the stand­ards com­mit­tees, and rep­res­ent some com­pany, ima­gine how much money is at stake in con­trolling the pace of a stand­ard. For example, lets ima­gine that your com­pany have a new Ethernet switch product run­ning behind sched­ule for devel­op­ment. Your com­pany might want you to delay the stand­ard so that your com­pet­itor doesn’t get to release a product first.

Because we can’t see those meet­ing details, bal­lots, and com­ments, the pub­lic can­not know what is happening.

DCB Standards are get­ting later

It’s worth not­ing that Cisco pre­dicted the DCB stand­ards would be fin­ished in 2009. Currently, they are expec­ted to fin­ish in 2010. They might I sup­pose, but it’s hard to tell whether they will. I have to wait for press releases from Cisco or HP to “tell me” when the stand­ards are expec­ted to be complete.

And another example, FCoE was sup­posed to fin­ish in 2008 accord­ing to Deepak Munjal and yet it was only fin­ished a few months ago in Q2 2009. That inform­a­tion was also not avail­able to the public.

So Remember

It might be that a lot of very nice men and women sit around the table and nego­ti­ate dif­fi­cult tech­nical prob­lems, and bring valu­able, eru­dite solu­tions after a great deal of research.

But I can’t tell for sure if some­thing else is happening.

These stand­ards affect your and my life by dir­ectly impact­ing the busi­nesses that we sup­port and that pay our wages /​ fees. Delays to stand­ards can have real impacts on exten­ded plan­ning and IT archi­tec­ture. Are we not entitled to have vis­ib­il­ity to this process ?

What do you think ?

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