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Linux’s Broadening Foundation - xSicKxBot - 06-11-2019
Linux’s Broadening Foundation
<div style="margin: 5px 5% 10px 5%;"><img src="http://www.sickgaming.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/linuxs-broadening-foundation.jpg" width="800" height="489" title="" alt="" /></div><div><p><em>It’s time to embrace 5G, starting with the Edge in our homes and hands.</em></p>
<p>
In June 1997, <a href="https://www.isen.com">David Isenberg</a>, then of<br />
AT&T Labs Research, wrote a landmark<br />
paper titled <a href="https://www.isen.com/stupid.html">“Rise of the Stupid<br />
Network”</a>. You can still find it <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html">here</a>. The<br />
paper argued against phone companies’ intent to make their own systems<br />
smarter. He said the internet, which already was subsuming all the world’s<br />
phone and cable TV company networks, was succeeding not by being smart, but<br />
by being stupid. By that, he meant the internet “was built for intelligence at<br />
the end-user’s device, not in the network”.
</p>
<p>
In a stupid network, he wrote, “the data is boss, bits are essentially free,<br />
and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data<br />
type.” That approach worked because the internet’s base protocol, TCP/IP, was<br />
as general-purpose as can be. It supported every possible use by not caring<br />
about any particular use or purpose. That meant it didn’t care about data<br />
rates or types, billing or other selfish concerns of the smaller specialized<br />
networks it harnessed. Instead, the internet’s only concern was connecting end<br />
points for any of those end points’ purposes, over any intermediary networks,<br />
including all those specialized ones, without prejudice. That lack of<br />
prejudice is what we later called neutrality.
</p>
<p>
The academic term for the internet’s content- and purpose-neutral design is<br />
<em>end-to-end</em>. That design was informed by <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf">“End-to-End Arguments in System<br />
Design”</a>, a paper by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Saltzer">Jerome Saltzer</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Reed">David P. Reed</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Clark">David D. Clark</a>,<br />
published in 1980. In 2003, <a href="http://weinberger.org">David<br />
Weinberger</a> and I later cited both papers in<br />
<a href="http://worldofends.com">“World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for<br />
Something Else”</a>. In it, we <a href="http://worldofends.com/#BM7">explained</a>:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
When <a href="https://www.craigburton.com">Craig Burton</a> <a href="http://www.searls.com/burton_interview.html">describes</a> the Net’s stupid architecture as a hollow<br />
sphere comprised entirely of ends, he’s painting a picture that gets at<br />
what’s most remarkable about the Internet’s architecture: Take the value out<br />
of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected<br />
end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and<br />
each to all, the ends aren’t endpoints at all.
</p>
<p>
And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to<br />
move bits around.
</p>
</blockquote>
</div>