ZeroMQ

Unprotocols

When this man thinks of protocols, this man thinks of massive documents written by committees, over years. This man thinks of the IETF, W3C, ISO, Oasis, regulatory capture, FRAND patent license disputes... and soon after, this man thinks of retirement to a nice little farm in northern Bolivia, up in the mountains where the only other needlessly stubborn beings are the goats chewing up the coffee plants.

Now, I’ve nothing personal against committees. The useless folk need a place to sit out their lives with minimal risk of reproducing; after all, that only seems fair. But most committee protocols tend toward complexity (the ones that work), or trash (the ones we don’t talk about). There are a few reasons for this. One is the amount of money at stake. More money means more people who want their particular prejudices and assumptions expressed in prose. But the second reason is the lack of good abstractions on which to build. People have tried to build reusable protocol abstractions, like BEEP. Most did not stick, and those that did, like SOAP and XMPP, are on the complex side of things.

It used to be, decades ago, when the Internet was a young and modest thing, that protocols were short and sweet. They weren’t even “standards,” but “requests for comments,” which is as modest as you can get. It’s been one of my goals since we started iMatix in 1995 to find a way for ordinary people like me to write small, accurate protocols without the overhead of the committees. ...