ITU To publish standards free of charge
When the Internet and OSI network protocol stacks went head to head in a standards war in the early 1990s many factors influenced the outcome.
Internet people usually cite the technical superiority of their specifications as the reason but besides being self-serving the sad fact is that such issues are rarely decided by which specification is 'best'. Betamax was technically superior to VHS in many ways but VHS was superior in one technical respect (longer playing time) but the main reason that people bought VHS recorders was that far more films were released on VHS than Betamax which in turn reflected the fact that more people had VHS which in turn...
One reason was that the Internet had an earlier start. The tipping point had already been reached by the time OSI implementations started to become available. The tipping point itself being the World Wide Web. However well a Web browser might work on the OSI network stack all the content was on the Internet.
Another reason was that participation in the development of OSI was much more difficult than participation in the IETF. The ITU is a UN agency steeped in the diplomatic culture. Issues such as allocation of radio spectrum or telephone dialing codes are usually tedious. But when the resources being allocated are limited they can easily lead to conflict. Wars have started for less.
Even implementation of the OSI stack was made more difficult. The IETF has always made its standards available free of charge. The ITU imposed steep charges. When I was implementing an X.509 parser library at CERN I found that it would cost hundreds of dollars to buy the specifications I needed for a relatively small project. The specifications for the complete OSI stack would cost tens of thousands of dollars. This might not be prohibitive for a large company but it certainly killed the possibility of any open source efforts.
The ITU is the guardian of many standards that we use every day. They describe the operation of the telephone system, broadcasting and much more besides. OSI is dead but even some parts of OSI live on (X.509 and ASN.1 in particular). Today's news that these standards will now be available for free is good news.
One company note, in bringing the news to the attention of the IETF, Brian Carpenter, the IETF chair recognized Carl Malamud and VeriSign VP Tony Rutkowski as the prime movers [1].
The standards are available on the ITU site in PDF format.
