Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Julian talks about a rant at the de-centralization mailing list at Yahoo. What he says is right on — specifically:
There’s another couple of truisms here that “standards are useless without implementations” and so “There are only de-facto standards”. Everything else is just academic (mutual) mind games.
If a standard isn’t implemented in the real world, it’s nothing more than a theoretical wanna be wrapped up in pretty white paper, tied with a standards group approval bow.
BTW, I used to go out to the de-centralization group and read the postings regularly, until I found one day that the whole exercise irritated me…badly. As much as I admire some people in the P2P community, there is no one in the field who is either God or the Ultimate Answer Person.
I took a look at the group after Julian’s posting. You know what? I found myself getting irritated all over again. And discouraged.