[237] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Should the NREN be funded?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Lee Schoffstall)
Thu Feb 28 13:24:46 1991
To: stev@ftp.com (stev knowles)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 28 Feb 91 11:53:15 EST."
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 91 14:17:45 -0500
From: "Martin Lee Schoffstall" <schoff@psi.com>
Stev,
Agreed, real research needs to be funded, by people who do real work; however,
we probably recognize that some "research" in the Internet has represented
sinecure's to individual's and institutions.
I think that the issue of owning a standard is incredibly harmful; however,
groups like the IEEE/CCITT are much more notorious for doing this than
the IAB (patent and other licensing to implement a standard seems
rather counter productive ala ieee802.5, ccitt v.42).
I think NFS is non-changeable more due to its wide spread implementation
and use than
SUN's ownership, their steps of arms-length meta-disownership should be
noted. But you are closer to that then I.
Some organizations do non-political research, Bell Labs is a well
known example of that, I think there are other smaller scale examples
that you could find even in the Internet. Though there are a lot
more examples of public domain engineering (rfc's are a good example)
and PD engineering/development (software for instance) in the Internet
that attenuate some of the factors you've pointed out.
Marty
--------
i will not address the rest of this posting, since it expresses the publicly
held opinions for PSI, but i would like to address this one point. there are
a large number of people who feel that this industry is starting to hurt
because of the lack of funding for general research done by "non-political"
parties (university type people). i feel that, in general, most companies
will only invest in technologies that they feel are primary to their current
business. between that and the fact that useful things are being developed
that are functionally non-changable because one company "ownes" it (like
NFS), lead me to believe that we need to start investing in non-partisan
research again, with the federal funding as a part of this.
stev knowles
stev@ftp.com
VP Engineering
