It is alive! Ship it!

"It's put into practice through vendors and community members and SIs and people who are wiling to make it work."

...giving us implementation-only monsters made from pieces that maybe Dr. Frankenstein would be able to put to good use, like the "Common Internet File System" also known as "Server Message Block"...

Citing http://www.ubiqx.org/cifs/SMB.html#SMB.1

"Without a current and authoritative protocol specification, there is no external reference against which to measure the "correctness" of an implementation, and no way to hold anyone accountable. Since Microsoft is the market leader, with a proven monopoly on the desktop, the behavior of their clients and servers is the standard against which all other implementations are measured. "