Stop using vendor terminology #387
Description
I admit I wrote the initial example which was about multiple fictitious vendors rojo and congo, proxies for cloud vendors in the room at one point, nothing more. It probably could have been better to fake an OSS project name in hind-sight, but anyway we can still fix this.
Commercialized vocabulary as is unnecessarily polarizing for those volunteering in their distributed tracing works.. they not selling anything. I've heard the rationale that "vendor" doesn't necessarily mean selling, but it is widely understood as the same. The word isn't helpful and some expressed to me they don't like having to use the word "vendor" to describe their tracing system.
The key concern is multiple participants, multiple propagation systems. The word system is more used in practice in my experience, but actually it is the format that has the most weight in the tracestate. For example, any participant that understands the same encoded format can operate. Let's say the example when we were at amazon. Amazon could have an extended format that could be cloned, just as their apis for cloud services have been in the past. That doesn't mean that the one using that format is amazon, it is just that they are using the same format and a similar system.