On Nov 3, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Henrik Levkowetz <henrik@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dear friends and acquaintances,
After 20 years of writing tools for the IETF, I will let my contract for
tools maintenance lapse at the end of the year, and move on to other things.
The reason is the attitude of the current IETF Chair and LLC Board towards
contractors in particular and IETF participants in general. Care for the
community doesn't seem to matter to them.
The current Chair and LLC Board seems to see contractors, including the
secretariat and myself, not as members of the community, but simply someone
who should do what they are told by the authority in charge. This in total
contrast with the approach of Russ Housley as IETF Chair; he explicitly
tried to make the secretariat and other contractors an integral part of the
community, inviting them in, rather than pushing them out.
Remembering how supportive the previous full Exec Dir, Ray Pelletier had
been with respect to the tools work, I was hoping that things would change
at the end of last year with Jay Daley; unfortunately it hasn't; rather the
opposite, and it has simply become too painful to carry on.
Things got bad at the end of last year, when the LLC Board went back on their
word after accepting my bid on the RFP in full without reservations; they
simply changed the contract offered without one word of conversation about
the changes. My bid would have been substantially different for an RFP with
the conditions in that contract. That was tough, but the final straw came at
the beginning of 2020, when a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team was
established to look at the tools future, and I was excluded from it. Being
considered a replaceable cog and not a part of the community is not a fun
environment in which to work, and I've been depressed for most of the year
following that.
The consequence is, as indicated above, that I will not sign on to any
contract renewal or bid on any new RFP when the current term runs out for
the tools maintenance contract at the end of the year.
Many and big thanks are due to all the IETF chairs who have supported and
encouraged my tools work: Harald Alvestrand, Brian Carpenter, Russ Housley,
and Jari Arkko. Huge appreciation and gratitude also goes to Robert Sparks
and Russ Housley for the privilege of working with them in the Tools Team
and the TMC (Tools Management Committee). And finally, thanks to all the
members of the community who over the years have made it a joy to do tools
work, by expressing their appreciation of the tools.
----------
The longer story, for background, to explain how I came to feel so strongly
about being excluded from tools architecture work and having the LLC Board
go back on their word without even thinking it was worth talking to me about
it:
I wrote my first draft of a draft in 1999; my first meeting was IETF 49.
In 2001, Sami Vaarala and I both presented drafts outlining NAT traversal
for Mobile IP, and based on the way we worked to merge these and build
consensus, I became co-chair of MIP4, a position I held till the group was
closed in 2015 (although there was essentially no activity during the last
5 years).
I early thought it absolutely silly that in the internet age, IETF documents
were not available as HTML documents with internal and external links. That
led to rfcmarkup (2002), which was deployed to provide htmlized versions of
RFCs, and later drafts, first on my own domain, and later on tools.ietf.org.
As I was writing drafts, I was annoyed with having to manually check the format
requirements (line length, boilerplate, and whatnot), and adapted an awk
snipped as a 10-line script to check line length for me (2003). That grew,
and became 'idnits'.
Having to read new revisions of drafts, to keep up with other Mobile IP
contributions, I found it annoying not to know where the changes in the new
rev were, and how much was changed. This led to 'rfcdiff' (2003).
As WG co-chairs, we had to put together a summary of the status of the various
documents before each meeting -- that status report was the main way to let
participants know about draft progress, since there was no datatracker in
2000, and no WG support in the IESG tracker tool when it appeared. Doing the
summary each meeting was very much drudge work, and becoming tired of repeating
the exercise each meeting, I created a document status page for MIP4, updated
automatically from various text files available from the draft repository and
the IESG tracker (around 2004). Other chairs saw this, and asked me to do the
same for them, and it grew from there, and was eventually incorporated into the
official datatracker as WG pages.
Around late 2006/early 2007, serious SQL injection vulnerabilities were
discovered in the datatracker as it was then. After a lot of feet-dragging
by the vendor in addressing the vulnerabilities, Bill Fenner and I started
a skunk-works project to completely rewrite the publicly accessible datatracker
from old-style Perl to Python and Django. For 2 months we worked up to 10
hours per day, and disclosed the effort only when we had enough in place to
show that the effort was viable. The powers that were applauded the effort,
and we carried through, and released the rewrite in June 2007.
I continued to do tools work during 40%-50% of my time up till 2016, at no
cost to the IETF -- all work and tools were donated by myself or my employer
over the years. In 2016 I was about to switch employers, and the IETF
Chair and several previous chairs saw the opportunity to get me to work full
time on IETF tools, which I happily did until the current chair started to
seriously treat me not as a member of the community but as a contractor that
needed to be told just what to do in early 2018. After that, things went
downhill.
As mentioned earlier, the final straw came early this year, when Alissa and
Jay decided to set up a Tools Architecture and Strategy Team, and excluded
me from that work. That was to me such a clear and unequivocal statement
of me not being considered part of the community that it drove me into a
depression, from which I could only partially recover by distancing myself
from the tools effort more and more. The depression has gone in waves in
the following months, often triggered by additional actions and statements
showing the same attitude.
I don't know which attitude the next Chair will have, but even if it's more
in line with earlier chairs, the LLC Board and Jay, who have been part of
making this year a miserable one for me, will still be there, not much changed.
So it's not with joy I move on and look for other things to occupy me; it's
with sadness in abandoning an area in which I've invested a lot of myself
over the last 20 years.
My best wishes to you all going forward.
Henrik
