Open standards and quality of service: pick one

By Cory Doctorow at 10:29 am Monday, Dec 9

IBM's Rod Smith is speaking at the Supernova conference. In his intro, he cites a lot of customer demand for both open standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Aren't these antithetical? If I'm running open standards, then the software at my end of the network can be set to abide by or ignore any signals send by the software at your end (as opposed to a proprietary system where both ends are welded-shut-boxes that always and deterministically do whatever the software author thought was best). That means that even though your software requests a priority level of x and a guaranteed pipe of y, you have no way of knowing whether my software is actually delivering x and y. All you can send me is a suggestion -- not a guarantee. Discuss