Hi John, Last year I've researched one topic. I have found many expired drafts 5-10 years ago on the topic. I am scared that behind this polite and politically correct discussion Would be the decision to shut up opinions that have lost political battles in respective WGs. I hope you understand, that IETF drafts are driven more by politics than technology. Hence, abandoned drafts are sometimes very valuable. I am happy that there are people like Scott Bradner that would not permit this information to disappear anyway. I am more confident now (after Scott's message), that it is not possible to clean other opinions anyway. Eduard -----Original Message----- From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf@xxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2022 7:59 PM To: Vasilenko Eduard <vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx>; Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx>; ietf@xxxxxxxx Cc: John Kunze <jak@xxxxxxxx> Subject: RE: Backdoor standards? --On Thursday, January 13, 2022 08:00 +0000 Vasilenko Eduard <vasilenko.eduard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > It is not good to clean all other opinions out of the public > availability, irrespective of IPR. It is the way to "there is my way > and there is the wrong way". Of course, would be the people that would > like to ban the opinions of opponents. Ed/ Ed, Either I misunderstand your comment or you misunderstood mine. I'm in favor of Mike's suggestion that we review some of these things and see if we still believe them. For me, that is more about how much has changed in the Internet generally and IETF specifically in, for example, the quarter-century since RFC 2026 was published and the even longer period since phrasing about other groups publishing such drafts first appeared. In that time, we have eliminated the provisions about deleting expired or "obsoleted" drafts (ones replaced by others) and made other small adjustments, but there has never been a comprehensive review of the (other) basic principles nor whether the current policy toward those expired and/or obsoleted drafts (they are probably two separate issues) is just right. While I think that review would be healthy --having principles and requirements that are not being followed and that few of us believe is clearly a bad idea-- my personal view is that, if changes are needed, they would be more about fine-tuning of what to do about replaced specifications than significant changes of direction and, in particular, handling of nominally expired I-Ds. I think Carsten's "Baby/bathwater" comment is a little exaggerated, but I share the concern. More to your particular point, no one has suggested prohibiting John Kunze and his colleagues (or anyone else) from putting forth their ideas. The discussion has been about documents that preserve versions of those ideas that they might have discarded, not about suppressing their current ideas. For this long set of drafts, I don't even see discarded ideas, only more details and better explanations. There is even an additional safeguard for getting dissenting views into public sight: the RFC series has been used to publish alternative to, and dissenting views about, protocols and design choices since before there was an IETF. The principles behind that are close to what you describe. Even today, there is a process, called "independent submission" for (among other things) publishing documents that say, explicitly or not, "I think the IETF is wrong about this because... and I have a better idea, which is...". Current procedures require drafts for such documents to first be posted as I-Ds but, were the IETF to prevent doing that (something many of us would fight very strongly), I assume the Independent Submission Editor would quickly adopt a different procedure. So, if we are actually disagreeing about anything --other than, perhaps, the desirability of periodically reviewing old decisions-- I'd like to understand how and about what. thanks, john
