Bob Metcalfe on Open Source, IPv6, IETF

prostoalex writes "The inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe is interviewed by AlwaysOn on current issues. Metcalfe is known for challenging commonly accepted wisdom and this time he's quite confrontational. On open source and operating systems: "If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?" On IPv6 adoption and IETF: "Back when you attended the IETF, you all looked down your noses at the ITU (or I guess it was called CCITT at the time)--the entrenched, corporately manipulated, corrupt, competent standards being embodied in IT. We were the IETF--the swashbuckling, institution-oriented, open people, the rebels. That's changed now. The Internet has arrived, and all of those people are now just like ITU: IETF has become the ITU.""

Comments

Re:Clunkers?

[AKAImBatman]

Mac OS X has one foot in the past (FreeBSD) and one foot in the future (Mach). Between the two of them, OS X is a bit more futuristic than its competitors. However, a machine that died before its time was the Symbolics LISP machines. I've never had the opportunity to use one, but my understanding of these machines is that they never needed any of the "modern" processor or software concepts we use today, because the underlying software system (LISP) was incapable of creating the types of memory corruption we try to prevent even today. And if a program blew up, you could actually modify its memory image on the fly and continue its execution.

On top of everything, the hardware architecture was much faster than contemporary computers due to its LISP oriented design. Apparently, a good portion of the LISP language was able to execute directly in the hardware!

At least, that's how I understood it. Sadly, it didn't get much attention outside of academia. :-/

The IETF is no longer an Engineering organization

[wayne]

I can't read the "always-on" story because it is slashdotted, but I'll comment on the IETF becoming the ITU.

AMEN!

As someone who has recent scars (SPF, MARID) from dealing with the IETF, it is clear to me that they are no longer an engineering organization, but rather a highly political one. No longer is there much concern about adopting patent encumbered technology into key Internet protocols (MS SenderID) like they used to object to things like the RSA patents.

Instead, the IESG is actively working to push through this patented technology by shutting down the MARID WG so that they can advance the SenderID proposal without any public review. More over, the IESG has declared that it is ok for the SenderID spec to re-use SPF records in incompatible ways, that the SPF RFC must be held back until MS is ready ("to be fair to MS"), and the IESG is going to ignore the last 1.5 years of SPF deployment experience and start fresh with collecting data since MS has only recently started doing SenderID checking (again "to be fair to MS").

The IETF needs to take the "E" out of their name and become the Internet Political Task Force.

Different "anonymity".

[khasim]

Bob is talking about packets using faked source addresses.

These are useless for anything other than a (D)DoS attack. They are useless because a connection cannot be established and no data can travel.

It is easy to have personal anonymity, but still have the first upstream router check the source addresses to make sure they are legit. But it depends upon someone, somewhere being willing to /dev/null his logs on a continuing basis and both sides using encryption. As you said, this is not technical, but social.

There is NO reason for the source address to not be confirmed by the upstream router.

There are LOTS of reasons for personal anonymity to be maintained. And we can have personal anonymity even if we confirm the source addresses of packets.

Re:Lisp

[mrdlinux]

There were a number of Object Oriented systems written on top of Lisp; because Lisp allowed such flexibility in the language.

Genera, unless I'm mistaken, was based on Zetalisp (LispMachine Lisp) with an object system named "Flavors", a message-passing system with mix-ins loosely based on Smalltalk. The GUI was written with this system, and the GUI itself was interesting because its introspective abilities closely mirrored that of the underlying language. The elements of the GUI were all objects that could be manipulated, selected, inspected. Even graphical and text output on the screen could be categorized into classes and later manipulated as objects. This became the basis for CLIM (Common Lisp Interface Manager).

Unfortunately this style of GUI has fallen to the wayside in favor of the simpler but stupider Windows-style one. C and C++ do not have the flexibility that is required, in any case, for a dynamic GUI like that on the Lisp Machine. Look to Smalltalk, Squeak, Slate, or the reinvigorated CLIM projects (McCLIM, FreeCLIM) instead.

Symbolics made bad business decisions, indeed. They still do exist, and even have the oldest .com name registered: symbolics.com. There is hope that someday all the thousands of man-hours of work on Genera will become unencumbered or re-released.

Stallman helped popularize Emacs, along with the free software movement, which developed in parallel with the similar editors of the Lisp machines. The problem with Stallman is that he is incredibly stubborn (no kidding), and made mistakes early on that he was unwilling to fix. Hence FSF Emacs and even XEmacs is crippled as an editor, a language, and a platform, though people who only make simple use of it might not understand why.

It is just as well that Lisp languished in FSF, because it sprouted elsewhere in the open source community, with no philosophical encumbrances which don't necessarily make sense in a dynamic environment like a Lisp.

Over the last five years, I've seen quite a revival of Lisp. The regular programming crowd slowly accepts new ideas; they still insist on making the same mistakes that were already passed by Lisp programmers years ago. Ah well. My job is working on systems in Common Lisp, I am happy.