On Sat, Sep 10, 2022 at 3:55 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 01:26:58PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>
> What I am saying is that XMPP is nowhere near successful enough to claim
> squatters rights on that particular problem area.
>
> The success of 'protocols' is irrelevant to me, I only care about
> infrastructures. At this point we can be reasonably sure that the Web will
> endure for centuries but that can't be said of HTTP or HTML or the WebPKI
> or any other 'protocol' that I worked on.
The IETF standardizes protocols, not infrastructures.
And if you think having somethinig at a particular standards level
will automatically mean that some other up-and-coming alternative is
doomed to failure, I'd suggest that perhaps you have a much higher
opintion about the value of having something called "Proposed
Standard" or even "Full Standard" might mean.
Squatting rights is a real issue inside the standards circuit.
That was one of the reasons I helped set up a rival standards organization to IETF and was then involved in helping a second standards organization establish itself as a rival to that one.
All that matters to me is what good we do for the users of the Internet. If the IETF is helping good things happen, I will support IETF, but if I consider something to be damage, I will route around it.
So no, I don't have an exaggerated sense of the importance of 'proposed standard' but rather a lot of other people do.
