g'day, Kyle Lussier wrote: . . . > I'm a strong proponent of the "one true mark", easy-in, no hassles. > With strong, but forgiving enforcement policies. > > That's the only way I see to do it, not to mention, if it's cheap > and easy, lots of people will do it, and you would generate a > $10m legal fund so that it had some teeth.
Now you're just getting silly. Let's see, you propose a fee of $100 per registration (presumably you intend a registration per product, and not a registration per company). Hmm, $10,000,000 divided by $100, that's 100,000 networking products registered. So what percentage of all networking products will get registered? Presumably not all of them, so you're assuming something well north of 100,000 commercially viable networking products are out there? Sounds a bit high to me. Presumably you've factored out all the non-commercial freeware, shareware and such stuff, since I can't see too many authors of such stuff giving away their labour *and* poneying up $100 for an IETF logo if they haven't bothered in most cases to send money to the Richard Stallman. And for those products left, do you charge for each release of a product? Each patch release? And is this a one time fee, or an annual fee? If one-time, the first lawsuit could wipe out your reserves, even if you win, so your contract with vendors had better have a clause letting you go back to the well whenever you need it. How many people would sign up for such recurring, unbounded fees? This all sounds like you're being a tad fluffy on the business side here... But the biggest problem here is that you've just created a $10M annual cashflow for the IETF to manage. This would be a massive infusion of cash for an entity that today runs on cookies and good will. Do you really think that you can put $10M (or gosh forbid, $10M *a year*) into a bank account without it starting to attract attention? History tells us it would immediately generate its own infrastructure to consume it (have you looked over at the DNS world recently?) Try for a moment to image the new class of problems this will entail for the IETF (and the new class of people who would show up for the "budgeting and cashflow management working group") if the IETF was suddenly worth $10M a year. Remember the old curse "be careful what you ask for, in case you actually get it"... Forget the technical merits of what you're proposing for a moment (because a number of people have already pointed out that it's "interoperability", NOT "compliance" that people actually care about. To assume otherwise is to assume an omnipotence about what gets done at the IETF that isn't justified by the historical record). Your problem here is that your business case seems to fail the smell test. But, hey if you really feel this has merit, I encourage you to go off for a while and work up the details. But be *really* specific. Personally I'm particularly interested in your business plan because after all, you're asking for at least $10M and the market has been down for the past year. If you can build a business that generates $10M a year with *this* idea, it would suggest that the downturn is finally over... So please include some market research on your numbers. I'd also like to see the detailed proposals outlining your processes, and I'd like to the names and fee schedules for the lawyers you've hired to vet all this. And finally, if you can work in seven layers somewhere I'd be willing to resurrect some old T-shirts from the early nineties for you, back from before people started taking the IETF this seriously... - peterd -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects, such as wickerwork baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art... - Tom Stoppard -----------------------------------------------------------------