Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile

The Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile (GOSIP) is a specification that profiles open networking products for procurement by governments.

Such profiles were begun by the Federal Government of the United States, but were widely adopted by other countries.

Timeline

• 1990 - The US specification requiring OSI protocols was first published as FIPS 146-1. The requirement for US Government vendors to demonstrate their support for this profile led them to join the formal interoperability and conformance testing for networking products, which had been done by industry professionals at the annual InterOp show since 1980.

• 1993 - Australia and New Zealand GOSIP Version 3 - 1993 Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile
• 1995 - OSI protocols are no longer mandated in the newly published FIPS 146-2, instead any of ISO, ITU-T or IETF standards could be used. In practice, and as expected, the IETF TCP/IP stack predominated, interest in OSI implementations declined, and worldwide the deployment of standards-based networking services have been predominantly based on the Internet protocol suite.

However, the Defense Messaging System continued to be based on the OSI protocols X.400 and X.500, due to their integrated security capabilities.

See also

• FIPS 146-2 announcement
• Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)
• OSI model
• ISODE (ISO Development Environment)