Qualifying-protocols-and-encodings.md (cloudevents#254)

* Qualifying-protocols-and-encodings.md

Signed-off-by: Clemens Vasters <[email protected]>

* updating per discussion in the PR

Signed-off-by: Clemens Vasters <[email protected]>

* Adding open source organization clause for equivalence with protocol standards org clause

Signed-off-by: Clemens Vasters <[email protected]>

* move into the primer

Signed-off-by: Doug Davis <[email protected]>

primer.md

@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@ This document is a working draft.
 - [CloudEvents Concepts](#cloudevents-concepts)
 - [Design Goals](#design-goals)
 - [CloudEvent Attributes Extensions](#cloudevent-attribute-extensions)
+- [Qualifying Protocols and Encodings](#qualifying-protocols-and-encodings)
 - [Prior Art](#prior-art)
 - [Roles](#roles)
 - [Value Proposition](#value-proposition)
@@ -145,6 +146,62 @@ user-stories to explain the rationale and need for them. This supporting
 information will be added to the [Prior Art](#prior-art) section of this
 document.
 
+## Qualifying Protocols and Encodings
+
+The explicit goal of the CloudEvents effort, as expressed in the specification,
+is "describing event data in a common way" and "to define interoperability of
+event systems that allow services to produce or consume events, where the
+producer and consumer can be developed and deployed independently".
+
+The foundation for such interoperability are open data formats and open
+protocols, with CloudEvents aiming to provide such an open data format and
+projections of its data format onto commonly used protocols and with commonly
+used encodings.
+
+While each software or service product and project can obviously make its own 
+choices about which form of communication it prefers, its unquestionable that 
+a proprietary protocol that is private to such a product or project does not 
+further the goal of broad interoperability across producers and consumers of 
+events.
+
+Especially in the area of messaging and eventing, the industry has made
+significant progress in the last decade in developing a robust and broadly
+supported protocol foundation, like HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2 as well as WebSockets
+or events on the web, or MQTT and AMQP for connection-oriented messaging and
+telemetry transfers.
+
+Some widely used protocols have become de-facto standards emerging out of strong
+ecosystems of top-level multi-company consortia projects, such as Apache Kafka, 
+and largely in parallel to the evolution of the aforementioned standards stacks.
+
+The CloudEvents effort shall not become a vehicle to even implicitly endorse 
+or promote project- or product-proprietary protocols, because that would be 
+counterproductive towards CloudEvents' original goals. 
+
+For a protocol or encoding to qualify for a core CloudEvents event format or 
+protocol binding, it must belong to either one of the following categories:
+
+- The protocol has a formal status as a standard with a widely-recognized 
+  multi-vendor protocol standardization body (e.g. W3C, IETF, OASIS, ISO)
+- The protocol has a "de-facto standard" status for its ecosystem category,
+  which means it is used so widely that it is considered a standard for a
+  given application. Practically, we would like to see at least one open
+  source implementation under the umbrella of a vendor-neutral open-source
+  organization (e.g. Apache, Eclipse, CNCF, .NET Foundation) and at least
+  a dozen independent vendors using it in their products/services.
+
+Aside from formal status, a key criterion for whether a protocol or encoding
+shall qualify for a core CloudEvents event format or transport binding is
+whether the working group agrees that the specification will be of sustained
+practical benefit for any party that is unrelated to the product or project
+from which the protocol or encoding emerged. A base requirement for this is
+that the protocol or encoding is defined in a fashion that allows alternate
+implementations independent of the product or project's code.
+
+All other protocol and encoding formats for CloudEvents are welcome to be
+included in a list pointing to the CloudEvents binding information in the
+respective project's own public repository or site.
+
 ## Prior Art
 
 This section describes some of the input material used by the working group