Subject: RE: Zeroconf and UPnP

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 21:09:24 -0700

I apologise for my delay in participating in the mailing list 
discussions, but we've been very busy recently at Apple finishing up Mac 
OS X 10.2. I owe people answers to some of the good questions that have 
been raised, and I will try to do that now.

>I guess I'll rephrase my question in a different way: if I were
>developing say a printer, home router, or other peripheral, would
>I implement UPnP or zeroconf?

Apple's interest in Zeroconf is as a way to retire AppleTalk.

Many of the people working on Zeroconf and UPnP may have similar overall 
goals, but Apple believes that UPnP is overcomplicated and harder for 
device vendors to implement.

Hence, Apple has decided to adopt (i) Zeroconf link-local address 
assigment, (ii) Multicast DNS and (iii) NIAS DNS Service Discovery as its 
protocol suite to meet the ease-of-use expectations of our customers, and 
thereby allow AppleTalk to be phased out. Apple's name for this 
initiative is "Rendezvous".

If you were developing a network printer last year and wanted to sell
it to Mac customers, you needed to implement AppleTalk on that printer.

If you are developing a network printer today and want to sell it to Mac 
customers, you would be much better advised to implement Rendezvous 
instead, because it is a lot less work than AppleTalk and works a lot 
better.

Having implemented Rendezvous in your printer, Apple has software we can 
provide to you to enable to you easily discover your device and use it on 
Mac OS 9, Linux, Windows, etc. You are not dependent on waiting for 
Microsoft to support this -- the necessary parts can be easily 
implemented as user-level application code. Indeed, the AirPort Base 
Station configuration software for Windows does exactly this already to 
discover and communicate with AirPort Base Stations on the network.

None of this has any bearing on whether you decide to put UPnP into your 
device as well. View Rendezvous as an alternative to having to put a 
whole AppleTalk stack in your printer, which is a big win in itself. If, 
having done that, you decide that simply running a Rendezvous client on 
Windows meets all your needs, then perhaps you can also save yourself 
having to put the whole UPnP (and/or UPnP 2) implementation into your 
device too -- but that's a decision for each vendor to make individually.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
 * Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
 * www.stuartcheshire.org

---

From: "Jim Fleming" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 23:35:03 -0500

Does "Rendezvous" come with an I* society member to
personally approve all printer configurations on your network ?
Surely, software can not operate on its own, without human
intervention, at each step of the way. If that were the case,
software might be able to "rendevous" with TLD servers and
bypass the root servers, and dynamically figure out the inclusive
namespace and track it directly from changes in the TLD servers...
...what a concept....software finding "the root"...not people...

...of course, that will never work...at least on the "toy" 32-bit
IPV4 Internet....run by the narrow-minded I* society...it is their
way or the highway...and many people seem to prefer the highway...

http://www.icannwatch.org/essays/icann-communique-of-the-gac-31-october-2002.html

Jim Fleming
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
017/8           Apple Computer Inc.                     Jul 92
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/130dftmail/unir.txt

P.S. How does Apple justify a /8 and compete with ARIN, RIPE and APNIC ?
Are non-profit companies allowed to compete with for-profit companies under U.S. law ?
How much does Apple have to pay ICANN each year for that /8 ?