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> In the ASN.1 space everyone hopes that someone can dethrone OSS Nokalva's proprietary solutions You're buying more than a compiler and runtime, though: you'

> In the ASN.1 space everyone hopes that someone can dethrone OSS Nokalva's proprietary solutions You're buying more than a compiler and runtime, though: you're also getting an SLA and a stricter guarantee about interoperability and bugs and so forth. I have no idea how good their support is (maybe it's atrocious?), but these are important. I had a client who relied on the open-sourced asn1c once who complained about some of the bugs they found in it; they got pushed into buying commercial when the cost-benefit outweighed the software licensing issues.

cryptonector 1y ago
Meh. After all, if you're not using ASN.1 you're using something like ProtocolBuffers or FlatBuffers or whatever and all open source tooling.
- memling 1y ago
  > Meh. After all, if you're not using ASN.1 you're using something like ProtocolBuffers or FlatBuffers or whatever and all open source tooling. Oh sure--there are plenty of alternatives to ASN.1. My guess is that most people who have the choice don't use ASN.1 precisely because open-source alternatives exist and can feasibly work for most use cases. But if you happen to have one of the use cases that require ASN.1, open sourced tooling can be problematic precisely because of the need for a robust SLA.
  - cryptonector 1y ago
    > But if you happen to have one of the use cases that require ASN.1, open sourced tooling can be problematic precisely because of the need for a robust SLA. Why would you need a support SLA for ASN.1 and not for PB/FB? That makes no sense. And there's plenty of open source ASN.1 tooling now -- just look around this thread!
    - memling 1y ago
      > Why would you need a support SLA for ASN.1 and not for PB/FB? That makes no sense. And there's plenty of open source ASN.1 tooling now -- just look around this thread! If your business depends on five nines plus of reliability in your 5g communications stack, you might be willing to fork over the price for it. Or if you need a bug fix made in a timely fashion to the compiker or runtime, likewise. As I've noted above, a client of mine moved to a commercial suite of tools for this reason. Protobuf and flatbuffers have different use cases in my experience, although that's somewhat limited. Protobuf at least also introduced breaking changes between versions 2 and 3. ASN.1 isn't perfect in this regard, but these days incompatibikities have to go through ISO or ITU, etc. Your experience may be different of course. I'm just pointing out that there are reasons people will opt for a commercial product.
      - cryptonector 1y ago
        > five nines Does one pay for an SLA for every piece of hardware, firmware, and software? The codecs are the least likely cause of downtime.
        memling 1y ago
        > Does one pay for an SLA for every piece of hardware, firmware, and software? The codecs are the least likely cause of downtime. I don't recall saying that—just that I have had clients for whom the support was sufficiently important (because of their own reliability concerns) that they went commercial instead of open source. (They required, among other things, 24x7 support and dedicated resources to fix bugs when found; they also sought guarantees on turn-around time.)
        cryptonector 1y ago
        Fair enough.
      - cryptonector 1y ago
        > Protobuf and flatbuffers have different use cases in my experience, although that's somewhat limited. This is true for the ASN.1 encoding rules as well. > Protobuf at least also introduced breaking changes between versions 2 and 3. ASN.1 isn't perfect in this regard, When has ASN.1 ever broken backwards compatibility? I've never heard of an ASN.1 backwards incompatibility. Maybe, if you stretch an interpretation of ASN.1 in 1984 to allow new fields to be added to `SEQUENCE { }` then the later addition of extensibility markers could count as a very weak backwards-incompatible change -- weak in that existing specs that use ASN.1 had to add those markers to `SEQUENCE { }`s that were actually intended to be extensible, but no running code was actually broken. I would be shocked if the ITU-T broke backwards compat for running code.

cryptonector 1y ago

Meh. After all, if you're not using ASN.1 you're using something like ProtocolBuffers or FlatBuffers or whatever and all open source tooling.

memling 1y ago
> Meh. After all, if you're not using ASN.1 you're using something like ProtocolBuffers or FlatBuffers or whatever and all open source tooling. Oh sure--there are plenty of alternatives to ASN.1. My guess is that most people who have the choice don't use ASN.1 precisely because open-source alternatives exist and can feasibly work for most use cases. But if you happen to have one of the use cases that require ASN.1, open sourced tooling can be problematic precisely because of the need for a robust SLA.
- cryptonector 1y ago
  > But if you happen to have one of the use cases that require ASN.1, open sourced tooling can be problematic precisely because of the need for a robust SLA. Why would you need a support SLA for ASN.1 and not for PB/FB? That makes no sense. And there's plenty of open source ASN.1 tooling now -- just look around this thread!
  - memling 1y ago
    > Why would you need a support SLA for ASN.1 and not for PB/FB? That makes no sense. And there's plenty of open source ASN.1 tooling now -- just look around this thread! If your business depends on five nines plus of reliability in your 5g communications stack, you might be willing to fork over the price for it. Or if you need a bug fix made in a timely fashion to the compiker or runtime, likewise. As I've noted above, a client of mine moved to a commercial suite of tools for this reason. Protobuf and flatbuffers have different use cases in my experience, although that's somewhat limited. Protobuf at least also introduced breaking changes between versions 2 and 3. ASN.1 isn't perfect in this regard, but these days incompatibikities have to go through ISO or ITU, etc. Your experience may be different of course. I'm just pointing out that there are reasons people will opt for a commercial product.
    - cryptonector 1y ago
      > five nines Does one pay for an SLA for every piece of hardware, firmware, and software? The codecs are the least likely cause of downtime.
      - memling 1y ago
        > Does one pay for an SLA for every piece of hardware, firmware, and software? The codecs are the least likely cause of downtime. I don't recall saying that—just that I have had clients for whom the support was sufficiently important (because of their own reliability concerns) that they went commercial instead of open source. (They required, among other things, 24x7 support and dedicated resources to fix bugs when found; they also sought guarantees on turn-around time.)
        cryptonector 1y ago
        Fair enough.
    - cryptonector 1y ago
      > Protobuf and flatbuffers have different use cases in my experience, although that's somewhat limited. This is true for the ASN.1 encoding rules as well. > Protobuf at least also introduced breaking changes between versions 2 and 3. ASN.1 isn't perfect in this regard, When has ASN.1 ever broken backwards compatibility? I've never heard of an ASN.1 backwards incompatibility. Maybe, if you stretch an interpretation of ASN.1 in 1984 to allow new fields to be added to `SEQUENCE { }` then the later addition of extensibility markers could count as a very weak backwards-incompatible change -- weak in that existing specs that use ASN.1 had to add those markers to `SEQUENCE { }`s that were actually intended to be extensible, but no running code was actually broken. I would be shocked if the ITU-T broke backwards compat for running code.