About Unprotocols.org

Unprotocols.org is the current grassy parking place in a long journey that started with an innocent question on Slashdot about ten years ago, about why it was so difficult for small engineering teams to develop new open standards.

To get here has been a lot of work.

First, let's get experience in actually building new open standards. The best experience comes from large-scale failure. This teaches us all the things to avoid. Thanks, AMQP, you taught me a lot.

Second, let's learn the business and politics of open standards. The best experience comes from actually working in standards bodies. Let's organize a global fight against OOXML, and learn from that how dirty businesses fight. Thanks, Microsoft, you taught me a lot. Hope you enjoyed that Kayak award we gave you.

Third, let's deconstruct the whole process of making open standards and rebuild it, better and faster than ever. The Bionic Process! Yes, decentralized sharing, mixing by contract, fork and merge, we get the picture. This is how we write software in 2011. By golly, let's use that for protocols too. And so we get the Digital Standards Organization, and its legal templates for free and open standards.

And when we have the tools, let's sharpen them. Where better than a living project, 100% community driven, that absolutely depends on solid, simple protocol specifications.

It's been a long journey but unprotocols is a great place to be. It literally becomes possible to write, review, correct, and start to implement a new protocol spec in a day.

Enjoy, and let me know what unprotocols does for you.

— Pieter Hintjens, 30 April 2011

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