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The Internet of Onions

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Re: The Internet of Onions

#31

Post by kbenson »

spitfire wrote: post #27
kbenson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By making the ecosystem useful enough that the benefits of doing it your own way are often outweighed by the benefits of being conformant to a standard. If I have a nice dashboard to ties together all the items in my house, giving me easy access to them all, nice status info at a glance, and summaries of usage and/or problems, any device I want to buy that doesn't tie into that nicely is going to really have to justi…

I'm with you all the way. That is the world I want to live in as well. I simply think the real it turns out somewhat different. Sadly.

I agree it often does. That's not to say that concerted effort can't make a change though. The internet itself works this way, partially because there wasn't a lot of concerted commercial interest initially, and partially because there existed standards, and that's cheaper.

It's hard for any one company to compete with Google or Apple when they decide to make their own standard and it's semi (or totally) proprietary, but then there's hardware and manufacturing it's harder to be totally dominant. If there's hundreds of companies that all do it a standard way, there's a lot less use in being the one company that's not compliant. There just needs to be something for all those other companies to target.

That's not to say it succeed, but if there's a chance, I think it's worth it to try.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#32

Post by rogerbinns »

kbenson wrote: post #24
rogerbinns wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that certification could also include verifying there is a plan in place for whatever period of support is reasonable. (We could dig deeper on this.) Configuration options are hard to support. Say for example a "power level" setting is exposed (how much power is consumed to provide the device functionality). But it is also the case that more power shortens the lifespan of the device. A general client can end up…

I think any certification that requires a plan be in place for future support is going to be either too weak (if the company goes under, support is gone) or too burdensome (requiring some trust be in place for future support should the company go under is very inefficient). Just allow more control by the user. This lowers barriers to entry for the market, and allows for interesting and unique future uses. As for non-…

We likely have different ideas of what constitutes future support. You seem to want the A+ package. I think it is sufficient that consumers get a pro-rated amount of their money back, depending on time since purchase. That can be done similar to insurance or escrow. (Although that is still a form a trust for future support.) If you buy something for $100 and 24 months later they pull service, should you get back $10 or $100? Only the smaller end seems viable to me.

> Just allow more control by the user

Given infinite people, time and money that is easy. I can't see any way of it being practical though. It is considerably more engineering effort, considerably more support effort (all that stuff has to be documented, tested and revised), will increase time to market etc. The only winners are those folks still using the device when service is pulled!

I'm sceptical that generic third party configuration could be reasonably done well. Is there any example of something similar? SNMP was mentioned as a failure by another commenter.

Certifying the software could be done like some other certification is done:

* Publish the list of best practises (eg authentication, update mechanisms, how they participate in the network, long term service)

* Have auditors (yeah they would need to be certified too) that will come in and examine a product/code base/service and give their blessing for relevant best practises. I'd imagine some open source libraries would end up certified too (eg an updater, or authentication) so a quicker path to product certification would be use already certified components.

* Award the certification based on auditor report

Yes it could be gamed, there would be wiggle room, bad actors etc. But it would be a lot better than we have now, and a feedback loop would help improve.

BTW I am working on a product somewhat in the space. I'd love to make it completely open, available for ever, plugin your own servers etc. But it isn't remotely viable for people, time and money reasons.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#33

Post by dredmorbius »

corbet wrote: post #30
azdle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, LWN has a feature that lets subscribers share a subscriber-only article with non-subscribers. I think there should be a message on the page along the lines of "A subscriber has made this available to you, would you like to subscribe?"

There is a message to that effect when non-subscribers read a sublinked article like this. Sometimes with a trial offer. The occasional (occasional!) posting of subscriber links is, I think, one of the best marketing tools we have.

Jon, I've been looking into a lot of elements of information goods, and there are a few bits I'm coming to realise, slowly (it's only been 30 years I've been studying this).

1. Information is a public good. Nonrivalrous, only very difficultly excludable. Strong positive externalities. Hal Varian's got a good piece on this. Doesn't mean you cannot sell it, but it means that doing exclusively has serious negative effects.

2. Free-sample giveaways are almost always an excellent idea. John Dvorak's recent "Whatever Happened to Wordstar" had an excellent illustration of this:

Worse, in 1985, the company produced Wordstar2000, a copy protected program that was nothing like the older lovable Wordstar and which contained annoying copy-protection features that scared most users away. While many pundits including Esther Dyson predicted great things for Wordstar2000, users rejected it. The product was big and slow and expensive. And despite complaints by the company and others, people wanted software they could copy and use on more than one machine. During this era piracy sold software and created market share. People would use a bootleg copy of Wordstar and eventually buy a copy. Wordstar may have been the most pirated software in the world, which in many ways accounted for its success. (Software companies don’t like to admit to this as a possibility.) Books for Wordstar sold like hot cakes and the authors knew they were selling documentation for pirated copies of Wordstar. The company itself should have just sold the documentation alone to increase sales.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/whatever-happened-to-wordstar-2/

3. Corporate and foundation grants and sponsorships or support may be an option. I've been following the Rockefeller Foundation's "100 and Change" program with some interest -- the application process is structured to also seek projects benefiting from other forms of support.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/03/us/macarthur-foundation-wi...

Food for thought.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#34

Post by armistace »

rogerbinns wrote: post #32
kbenson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any certification that requires a plan be in place for future support is going to be either too weak (if the company goes under, support is gone) or too burdensome (requiring some trust be in place for future support should the company go under is very inefficient). Just allow more control by the user. This lowers barriers to entry for the market, and allows for interesting and unique future uses. As for non-…

We likely have different ideas of what constitutes future support. You seem to want the A+ package. I think it is sufficient that consumers get a pro-rated amount of their money back, depending on time since purchase. That can be done similar to insurance or escrow. (Although that is still a form a trust for future support.) If you buy something for $100 and 24 months later they pull service, should you get back $10…

I am not by any means an engineer so you can most definitely take what I say with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that all that really needs to happen for IoT devices to be usable by a third party is for the manufacturer to simply publish the API and provide a mechanism for the end user to control what interfaces with the API. It doesn't actually require you to standardise the API as you have never guaranteed compatibility with any third party it simply requires documentation, which would have to already exist internally for development purposes, and on some level some loss of control. But surely, this way you then get to maintain control and development for as long as you want to support it and for those people that then want to support it themselves after you have abandoned it can as API is a known entity. I am probably fundamentally misunderstanding an aspect of the development of this somewhere but this does not seem that burdensome to me I don't even see the necessity of a standard that needs maintaining here just documentation of the API and a mechanism to change where the data is sent. Hell if you want to maintain control for the life of the device fine, but what is so hard about releasing that information when you no longer want anything to do with it, what possible commercial value does that information hold then?

Re: The Internet of Onions

#35

Post by kbenson »

rogerbinns wrote: post #32
kbenson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any certification that requires a plan be in place for future support is going to be either too weak (if the company goes under, support is gone) or too burdensome (requiring some trust be in place for future support should the company go under is very inefficient). Just allow more control by the user. This lowers barriers to entry for the market, and allows for interesting and unique future uses. As for non-…

We likely have different ideas of what constitutes future support. You seem to want the A+ package. I think it is sufficient that consumers get a pro-rated amount of their money back, depending on time since purchase. That can be done similar to insurance or escrow. (Although that is still a form a trust for future support.) If you buy something for $100 and 24 months later they pull service, should you get back $10…

> You seem to want the A+ package.

No, I'm fully on board with zero support, given that's communicated up front. Let the market sort out whether people think that's a good idea. I care less about certifying devices to some standard level of quality, mainly because we're so far away from knowing what that is, than I am in opening up the ecosystem to fight planned (and negligent) obsolescence.

> I'm sceptical that generic third party configuration could be reasonably done well. ... SNMP was mentioned as a failure by another commenter.

SNMP is still used quite heavily in network devices. It's painful because it's complicated, but it's still one of the standards you can rely on any enterprise network device to support (as I understand it, I've dealt with that less the last five years or so), at least for the reading of information. In that respect, it's a success story. That said, I imagine the average network device in that category might be an order of magnitude or harder to deal with configuring (physical connector options, link level options, protocol options, route control and propagation, access lists, etc).

> Is there any example of something similar?

IP, TCP, UDP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP. The core protocols started as free standards, but for mail, compare to exchange. Exchange persists still due to its advanced capabilities and tight integration with other Microsoft products, but it's not what ended up being used for integration in the current generation of mail programs. They all support IMAP and/or POP3, because why write your own tools to migrate mail or provide third party access when a suitable protocol and suite of tools exist.

> BTW I am working on a product somewhat in the space. I'd love to make it completely open, available for ever, plugin your own servers etc. But it isn't remotely viable for people, time and money reasons.

Yeah, and I'm not arguing that you should do this. But if a standard existed, and there were free or cheap libraries that did most the heavy lifting for you, it's possibly that would make it the more viable choice for those same reasons. E.g. A light weight HTTP server with route engine to hook into your own libraries,or even to just write to a config file and HUP your daemon.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#36

Post by kbenson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
kbenson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customers aren't witholding money from products I think part of the problem here is that everything is so new, relatively speaking, that almost no company can actually trade on their reputation. If today a company was able to advertise on having sold internet connected devices for a decade and their earlier devices still worked well in some manner, then people might actually use that in their purchase criteria. Who…

> Similarly, a standard for how to change settings for devices would be useful. I wonder if OPC UA could serve this role. It's something I only discovered recently due to a work project, but it seems pretty relevant to IoT and also is used in the industry (as in, industrial industry, not the shiny startup cloud party).

That's interesting. I'm going to look into this. Thanks!

Re: The Internet of Onions

#37

Post by rogerbinns »

armistace wrote: post #34
rogerbinns wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We likely have different ideas of what constitutes future support. You seem to want the A+ package. I think it is sufficient that consumers get a pro-rated amount of their money back, depending on time since purchase. That can be done similar to insurance or escrow. (Although that is still a form a trust for future support.) If you buy something for $100 and 24 months later they pull service, should you get back $10…

I am not by any means an engineer so you can most definitely take what I say with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that all that really needs to happen for IoT devices to be usable by a third party is for the manufacturer to simply publish the API and provide a mechanism for the end user to control what interfaces with the API. It doesn't actually require you to standardise the API as you have never guarantee…

> ... for the manufacturer to simply publish the API ...

That is more work than not publishing the API. How much more work then? I'd pick stats from The Mythical Man Month where they claimed that doing something for external consumption is nine times the effort than internal only. Admittedly it does predate AWS, containers etc, but then again those aren't that useful for iot.

Re: The Internet of Onions

#38

Post by armistace »

rogerbinns wrote: post #37
armistace wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not by any means an engineer so you can most definitely take what I say with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that all that really needs to happen for IoT devices to be usable by a third party is for the manufacturer to simply publish the API and provide a mechanism for the end user to control what interfaces with the API. It doesn't actually require you to standardise the API as you have never guarantee…

> ... for the manufacturer to simply publish the API ... That is more work than not publishing the API. How much more work then? I'd pick stats from The Mythical Man Month where they claimed that doing something for external consumption is nine times the effort than internal only. Admittedly it does predate AWS, containers etc, but then again those aren't that useful for iot.

Ok makes some sense but why not just provide the API and a mechanism to change where data is sent after you have decided not to support the device anymore? Surely that is not to burdensome and will give someone out there the option to continue using the device (and probably save some goodwill over the dropping of support)?
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