> So yes Dean, I think you elude to the central issue - what is the common > interest, and as the community was propelled almost forceably, and > inexorably by market forces from a world where as Randy put it > "operators cooperated" together, in a non-commercial endeavor based on > very non-commercial values, into a very commercial world, did the > community ever have a chance to take a big breath, inspect what has > happened, and where it really wants to go from here. Ok, here is MY opinion on the central issue: Deployed communications systems are either military or commercial. Pure research doesn't deploy systems. OC-192 equipment and millions of miles of fiber aren't cheap. Those complaining about how great things were when they were non-commercial were preceeded by people complaining about working for the military. The people who don't want to service the commercial sector, and don't want to service the military sector, really don't realistically have much of a place in our society outside of pure research, and shouldn't be given control over the future commercial or military applications of the internet. But it comes down to a question of whether science serves public policy or whether public policy serves science. Which is the tail, and which is the dog? There is room for some pure science for nothing other than the sake of pure science, but most of the research has to be done for productive commercial or military purposes. I think this is a pretty general statement that is as true of biotech research as it is of communications research. And since the internet is now vastly commercial, and international, the leaders of the IETF ought to focus research on things that will be commercially useful. The present situation, in my opinion, the tail is wagging the dog. This should be changed. The IETF mission should make clear what the constituencies are, what the goals are, and what the priorities are, so that the tail does the wagging. It used to be that engineering and operations within a company "cooperated together", sharing work and, of course, passwords. In small companies, this is still be true. But in many large telecom companies, engineering is denied access to the production systems, and only the operations staff can make changes. This is necessary to ensure commercial stability, since custom engineering changes don't scale well, and don't lead to widely stable systems, since the custom changes may not be made on all systems. Large groups work at arms length, even within a company, with well defined protocols and policies regarding who can do what. Of course, there are inevitable disagreements between engineering, operations, sales, etc. These are resolved civilly, within the organization, and may include appeals to senior management. Those that know me, know that I'm usually working in the engineering group, which means I am sometimes arguing with the operations group for access to a newly deployed production system. The first few times, I usually win. But I either have to stop asking or lose these disgreements, in favor of documented troubleshooting procedures for the benefit of improved stability. There are good reasons that practices that might have been nice for small companies are abandoned by big companies. The IETF has this same issue. Clearly, there are going to be even greater problems when many companies come together to work on the same problems. It is not reasonable to expect that a few people can just "cooperate together" and work something out for a large community. What worked for the Internet many years ago isn't going to work again--ever again--anymore than it would work for a large telecom company to share passwords between engineering and operations. --Dean