[335] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: A few questions re current discussions...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James B. Van Bokkelen)
Mon Mar 11 09:45:33 1991
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 09:34:28 -0500
To: Jack Haverty <jhaverty@us.oracle.com>
From: jbvb@ftp.com (James B. Van Bokkelen)
Reply-To: jbvb@ftp.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
... There are technical issues here to be sure, but I suspect the
biggest obstacles are organizational, political, and managerial.
I don't see it that way. People who are willing to install infrastructure
software from non-commercial source are not that common (although at one
time most of the Internet's sites necessarily had several around). Instead,
it is a matter of commercial developers being willing to take a long view.
Deciding that you're going to provide the "chicken" (writing your end of a
protocol that isn't widely distributed) to start things off is an investment
with a potential payoff period of two or three years, or maybe never. Read
most any management study in the past 10 years for a discussion of how many
American companies handle the long view...
To use an example we've hashed over: the current installed base of NFS is
obsolete (due to its insecure nature, if for no other reason), and is going
to be a major obstacle to the growth of TCP/IP and the Internet over the
next few years. One side of the Unix war contiues to offer us Falcons and
Novas. It isn't entirely clear to me who has the equivalent to the Corolla
or the B210. OSF? Novell? The market will find them pretty soon, or
create them if they don't already exist...
James B. VanBokkelen 26 Princess St., Wakefield, MA 01880
FTP Software Inc. voice: (617) 246-0900 fax: (617) 246-0901
