At 12:06 AM -0700 7/21/06, Dave Crocker wrote:
By way of providing some incentive, I suggest that Proposed have a limit, such as 3 or 5 years (and, yes, we can quibble about that, too.) If the work cannot gain sufficient adoption by the end of that time, it has failed and warrants moving to Historic.
Fully disagree. If there is "some implementation but not enough" it should remain "proposed". Otherwise, vendors will hesitate to implement protocols that might eventually make them look silly ("why does the box include the FrobzBaz protocol when everyone knows that it is Historic?").
This leads to two designations: Proposed and Full. An implementer looking at a Proposed standard would assess how long it has been out and which other implementers have put it in competing products to assess whether they want to put it in theirs. Things labelled Full standard would probably be put in by default.
Vendors really do care about this. They don't want to look bad for including the "wrong" features, and they don't want to look bad for not including popular ones. I regularly get calls from VPNC members asking about whether or not they should implement various standards, both in the positive sense ("is it worth paying an OEM to include this?") and in the negative sense ("will we look silly if we include this, even though it is in the standard?").
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf