> From: Eric Rosen <erosen@cisco.com> > ... > > Sheesh!--next you'll be telling us that you never heard the phrase > > "out of scope" before last week. > > Sure I have. There's hardly a piece of work done by the IETF that someone > hasn't claimed to be out of scope. It's just that the phrase is not used > consistently. That's true. > If we look at the historical facts about the work that the > IETF has traditionally taken on, it's hard to draw any conclusion other than > that anything is in scope which promotes and facilitates the use of the > Internet and of IP infrastructure. And I think that's exactly what the IETF > should be doing. That's wrong. At best it's meaningless. For example it supports lobbying Congress. > > The example I'm thinking about involved predecessors to OpenGL. > > As this example doesn't even involve communication over a network, I would > agree that it is out of scope. ... It was out of scope, but not because it did not involve putting graphics stuff over UDP or TCP, because it did. My fellow employees in SGI's network group and I breathed a sigh of releaf when Ron returned from an IETF meeting to report that "out of scope" had carried the day against other IETF participants who thought that knowing people who knew about Nagle and congestion control and avoidance was enough to design graphics remote procedure calls or similar. It's not that other examples such as X couldn't have used more network knowledge to avoid problems (e.g. the mouse stuff), but that the network stuff is the tail of that and many other dogs. Because of my employement history, I may know a little more about how to do graphics in general or over IP networks than many IETF participants, but I know that I'm abjectly completely utterly incompetent for doing exactly what the IETF started to do in that case. > > Often the brutal WG chairs say they don't think the WG knows enough, but > > it's the scope arguments that carry the day. > > I've never had much luck myself with scope arguments, unless they could be > backed up with an argument either that the center of expertise is elsewhere, > or that the topic has no bearing on IP. Of course, people will sometimes be > willing to agree that the center of expertise is elsewhere without > necessarily agreeing that they themselves aren't experts ;-) Sometimes scope > arguments are merely face-saving ways of saying "we don't know what we are > doing". Other times, scope arguments are merely "polite" ways of saying "we > don't think you know what you are doing". You almost never hear someone > saying "that sounds like a really good idea, but unfortunately it is out of > scope". Yes, with the proviso that you mean you usually don't hear people really meaning that last sentence. You certainly hear those words a lot. If "out of scope" were removed as an acceptable reason to not do things, then you would never squelch bad efforts. I suspect the whole effort of defining IETF charters or missions is a very bad idea. It's often better to not spell things out, but to rely on the good judgement of the people running the show. Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com