ps: ...
On Mon, 9 Jan 2023 at 11:33, Alec Muffett <alec.muffett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 9 Jan 2023, 11:14 Vittorio Bertola, <vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:who are you, the IETF or your employer to judge or question what a sovereign nation of 5-10-80 million people decides for themselves through democratic processes? Who gave you this right and this role, and how is this compatible with democracy?I am a software engineer. I write code and occasionally people find it useful in their daily lives. Very occasionally it might become intensely popular, but no more than Shakespeare's, Moliere's or Goethe's works, which people also find likewise popular.Who voted for them to write literature which people enjoy?
In case people think I am exaggerating, or if folk lack enough history:
I used to be the "cryptographic moderator" for the comp.sources.misc USENET group. I literally personally approved* the posting of Eric Young's "libdes" to USENET, which begat SSLeay, which begat OpenSSL.
If you're old enough, you will also remember when "SSH" was a new thing posted by some guy in Finland named Tatu Ylonen, rather than the bedrock of multi-millions (-billions?) of dollars of secure communication.
Not to mention Phil and PGP and the "export it as an OCR-capable book" thing.
All of this stuff started small.
Who is now telling us that it should have been voted into existence, because it might have "democratic impact" in ways that popular literature might not?
"Gosh, next you'll be arguing that code does not qualify as speech." <ducks/>
- alec
--
