Extending Reach of Open Source Through Standards
ABSTRACT: Open source communities move quickly, value running code, and docs are best effort at best. Standards move slowly, value precise specs, and compromise fo …
| Talk Title | Extending Reach of Open Source Through Standards |
| Speakers | Charles Eckel, Cisco Systems |
| Conference | NANOG74 |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| Date | Oct 1 2018 - Oct 3 2018 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | Talk Video |
ABSTRACT: Open source communities move quickly, value running code, and docs are best effort at best. Standards move slowly, value precise specs, and compromise for broad alignment. Given these differences, why would open source communities fraternize with standards orgs? Standards orgs such as IETF and MEF realize they need to change remain relevant. By embracing open source, standards orgs benefit from the speed and collaborative spirit of open source and get timely feedback on the clarity and correctness of standards as they evolve in parallel with running code. Open source communities gain users, address additional use cases, and gain stability of standards to ease integration efforts and avoid forks. This session explores this evolution in standards orgs, highlights areas of mutual interest, and shares ideas on the benefit of closer collaboration. AUDIENCE: The audience is anyone actively involved in open source communities or standards organizations, as well as developers, architects, system integrators who are struggling with the relative value of traditional standards based approaches in light of the recent wave of open source solutions. BENEFITS TO THE ECOSYSTEM: By collaborating with standards organizations and supporting existing and evolving standards, the open source community gains users, address a larger set of use cases, and gain stability of standards that can helps avoid harmful forking and ease integration efforts. Standards orgs benefit from the speed and collaborative spirit characteristics of open source, and they gain timely and critical feedback on the clarity and correctness of their standards as they evolve iteratively and in parallel with the open source code. The end result is open source code that is more consumable by industry, and standards that are more consumable by the open source community.
