At 09:49 PM 7/23/2002 -0400, Peterson, Jon wrote:
>I believe that the industry, the press and even some governments have
>consistently looked to the IETF to produce a single standard for instant
>messaging and presence precisely because IM&P is an unusually balkanized
>application on the Internet
Jon (et al)
The IETF does technical work. It does not do marketing work. We let the
market do marketing work.
The primary criteria for doing work in the IETF are:
- our having adequate technical competence for the task
- the proposed work having adequate clarity and feasibility
- a sufficient pool of people willing to work on it
- a reasonable indication that there will be suppliers of the result
- some indication that there will be consumers of the result
All of these conditions are satisfied by Jabber, pending a working group
charter that is clear, tight and practical. I'm not too worried about the
charter satisfying these requirements.
When the IETF tries to stifle competition, it usually does a bad job all
around.
When the IETF tries to listen to "market" factors with any more subtlety
than "there appear to be some ready suppliers and consumers of the work"
then it usually does a bad job.
Sometimes, yes, the IETF stifles competition, but the only times it does
that constructively is when there is a good technical basis. Otherwise, it
lets the work of the constituencies and the reaction of the market do the
filtering.
The IETF has been working on IM&P for 4 years. You may have noticed that
the balkanization of the IM&P world has not been reduced after all that
time. One might even take the recent AOL announcement that it is backing
off from interoperability efforts as a good indication of just how bad the
situation remains.
>Starting from the idealistic conceit that we could eventually arrive at
>consensus on one IM&P protocol, the IETF went through a lengthy, bitter
>process (echoes of which were the root cause of much of the ugliness at the
>Jabber BoF) to arrive eventually at CPIM
and we should all remember that CPIM represents a very explicit
acknowledgement that there are -- and will be -- multiple IM&P protocols.
>- which was a significant
>accomplishment - and three competing WGs that were CPIM-compliant. By most
>measures SIMPLE
In terms of my own understanding of IETF culture, priorities and rules,
with respect to the Jabber initiative, the accuracy of your assessment is
frankly irrelevant. And the failure to recognize that it is irrelevant is
the core of the problem with the misbehavior by a number of SIMPLE
advocates.
> I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest that chartering a new
>WG today that competes directly with SIMPLE would be taken by many to mean
>that the IETF still has not arrived at a workable solution (and no doubt
People often choose to interpret things in a way that has nothing to do
with reality. Another thing the IETF does very badly is try to
second-guess inaccurate interpretations of things. For that matter, most
people outside the IETF do that rather badly too.
d/
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Dave Crocker <mailto:dave@tribalwise.com>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850