On 20 May 2024, at 13:15, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 5/20/2024 10:55 AM, Pete Resnick wrote:
On 5/10/2024 2:33 PM, Dave Crocker wrote:
Companies do not make public, future commitments for implementing
standards. And when there are attempts to get them to, they waffle
and evade.
Some do, some don't. We've had experience in the email community where
people participate quite openly, show up for the hackathon with
example code, and discuss their implementation plans quite openly.
We've also had experience where (mostly large) companies do exactly
what you describe. The requirement is not that all participants in the
WG make a commitment to implement; just two or more.
If you know of examples of this being done -- in the IETF context, especially -- please document them.
That you think showing up at a hackathon is equivalent to satisfying this wg's charter requirement for a priori commitment might suggest the nature of the very basic disconnect that prompted this chartering error.
Ah, so let's go back to the charter text, because it sounds the disconnect is one of understanding the text, then maybe it needs to be clarified. And, to be clear, there was no chartering error. (I would normally state this in terms of my belief, but that doesn't seem to be the way we are doing things in this discussion.) So:
- Prior to accepting any Standards Track document for development, there must be a commitment to implement the resulting proposed standard from at least two independent parties, as recorded on a related IETF mailing list.
Neither the words "company" nor "corporate" appear in there. It does not refer to any sort of formal public announcement of upcoming product (which, at least when I was working in corporate land, was the line you couldn't cross). It's just an implementers commitment to implement. So, what do I think would be an example, or has been done in the past? I see such statements from people from Fastmail (Bron, etc.), Isode (Alexey), Dovecot (Timo), and several others on the EXTRA and JMAP lists all of the time. They say, in meetings and on mailing lists, "We'll be implementing that" or "We've implemented that, but completely differently", or "We're not going to be implementing that". And they bring their example code to hackathons and show that they've been implementing it. Back in the day, I could cite numerous similar examples from Eric Allman and Ned Freed and myself saying the same sorts of things about sendmail, PMDF, and Eudora. Any of those statement would, in my mind, satisfy the requirement of the charter, and they're perfectly reasonable things to ask for.
pr
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Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best
