closed systems (was Re: SDSI/SPKI background)

[Carl Ellison]

At 09:56 PM 6/11/2003 -0700, Carl Ellison wrote:
>It's also almost exclusively for a closed authorization
>infrastructure, rather than an open naming infrastructure.

Because of its predominant use in closed, often proprietary systems,
standardization is of questionable value.  As long as each closed
system's vendors (usually 1) agree among themselves on structure
format, they're happy.  Most of the fielded implementations I have
seen would not interoperate with each other, because the vendor took
some shortcuts -- following RFC2693 faithfully, but getting creative
with the structure (the draft).  It worked for them - didn't cause
any trouble.

 - Carl



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|Carl M. Ellison         cme at acm.org     http://world.std.com/~cme |
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