Re: Shuffle those deck chairs!

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[vixie]
> ... i do think the iesg/iab should think carefully about making
> something a proposed standard or draft standard or full standard
> without having first negotiated royalty-free use rights on behalf of
> all future implementors, as scrocker did with jbezos for the RSADSI
> IPR that went into early dnssec.

[carpenter]
> I don't think we can require the IESG to negotiate anything. There are
> all kinds of legal issues there.  To my knowledge, both WGs and the
> IESG do think carefully about this, but often conclude that the
> default IETF conditions (RAND) are realistic and acceptable.

what you call "concluding", i call "railroading" and "inertial ignorance."

> The IETF exists to make the Internet work better, not to exclusively
> support the open source movement.

my arguments on this topic aren't related to the "open source" movement.

> [This doesn't mean that I am against RF or OSS - it means I want the
> IETF to continue to live in the real world, where patents and
> royalties continue to exist alongside OSS.]

the hull of brian's boat just scraped the top of an iceberg, but i'm
going to try to answer without having to pull this asteroid-sized chunk
of ice out of the water and show it to all of you.  even so, everybody
check your seat belts and shoulder straps, 'cuz i gotta learn ya somehow:

1. in spite of not having a clear corporate status, ietf is a de facto
   public trust.  companies and people participate in ietf because they
   believe certain things, and among those things is what brian said:
   "because it's a way to get work done."  there are however other
   things, and exactly what those things are is at the heart of the
   current isoc-ietf-malamud hairball nightmare.  we won't get very far
   in this discussion if we presuppose universals not yet determined,
   but neither can we afford to postpone every discussion that touches
   on them.

2. the universal assumptions i have encountered, and which i, and isc,
   and isc's executive team, and isc's board of directors, and isc's
   employees, all happen to hold, include: process transparency,
   unbiased decision making, and technological superiority.  by
   "encountered", i mean that everyone i have met who knows anything
   about ietf mouths those slogans, and most people i have met actually
   believe in them and act as if those slogans were self-evident truths,
   worthy of absolute support.

3. with regard to process transparency, you have all had a chance to
   read my thoughts about california's "sunshine law" which holds that:

	The people of this State do not yield their sovereignty to the
	agencies which serve them.  The people, in delegating authority,
	do not give their public servants the right to decide what is
	good for the people to know and what is not good for them to
	know.  The people insist on remaining informed so that they may
	retain control over the instruments they have created.

	(Gov.Code § 54950)
	(Message-ID: <g31xhsl5kx.fsf@xxxxxxxxxx>)

   and i've brought this up when i think that the servants to whom
   authority has been delegated think that "the people" do not have a
   right or need to know what's really going on.  after the last time i
   aired this concern, various people mouthed the right slogans, but the
   nontransparency has remained, along with my concerns.  apparently,
   i'm just not getting through.

4. with regard to unbiased decision making, you have all had a chance to
   read my thoughts on the RSA-vs-DSA decision made by the original
   dnssec working group, which included the following (in April 1994):

	What this looks like from here is a coup attempt by RSA.
	...
	But I think it behooves the IETF, as supposedly representing the
	interests of the Internet community, to think VERY CAREFULLY
	about the implications of giving a company like RSA this kind of
	monopolistic cash cow.

	(http://sa.vix.com/~vixie/rsa-wars.txt)

   and the final result was that the working group dragged its feet and
   contemplated its navel long enough that john gilmore and steve crocker
   and jim bezos, with kibitzing from paul mockapetris (then ietf chair)
   and myself, were able to hammer out a royalty-free use agreement whereby
   any implementor or operator of Secure DNS could use RSA's crypto for
   DNSSEC, whether for commerce or not, whether closed or open source.

   (http://www.toad.com/dnssec/pressrel1.background.txt)

5. with regard to technical superiority, you have all had a chance to
   read my thoughts on m. weng's SPF debacle, wherein his ignorance
   about how the technology worked was coupled with his excellent sales
   and marketing skills to delay the development of e-mail repudiation
   technology; you've seen my rants as to the "rubber-stamp" nature of
   the MARID working group; you've seen me describe microsoft's layer 9
   attack against the IPR as both the only way to stop m. weng's bandwagon
   and also the final death throes of any fiction that this was an open
   standard where anyone's opinion but m. weng's actually mattered.

as much as i hate to be seen agreeing with mr. raymond, who has
inaccurately characterized both his own representative powers and the
minority status of those views of mine he does not share, there is one
grain of truth to what he has said here of late.  standards will be
open, and ietf's choice is not whether standards will be open (that
being foregone), but whether ietf will continue to be the place where
these open standards are defined.  "open" in this context requires
actual and passionate adherence to, and not just the mouthing of the
slogans for, process transparency, unbiased decision making, and
technological superiority.

i suppose that the "executive summary" of my response to brian's above
quoted words would therefore be: "lead, follow, or get out of the way".

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