Thierry Ernst wrote:
In principle I would be against charging, but my experience of being a chair makes me believe that many authors have no reason to publish their I-D which are just a burden to the I-D secretariat and thus the entire IETF community. In many occasions, I have seen new drafts been announced by the secretariat, but not announced by the authors themselves in the WG they were targeting. In several occasions I emailed such authors to know more about their intention and many times I didn't get any reply at all. The others replied pt-2-pt but never announced their draft on the WG list (but they asked the chairs to do so ;-). So, my conclusion is that in most cases these are students who in their academic standards are required to show evidence of publication. I'm not sure the IETF is designed for this. In the other cases, prospective authors do not understand the IETF process, or are to shy to advertise their work. So, this proposition of charging could be refined as "pubishing I-Ds that are not supported by any WG should be charged" or something similar. Of course, WG drafts should be free of charge. Note that the aim of this proposition would not to get more fund to the IETF, but to relieve the IETF of the cost of processing drafts that are never read, never discussed, and absolutely useless.
Understood. Let me add one thing I notice over and over again: drafts that do not state where discussion should take place. This really belongs on the front page.
Anyway, with the automated submission process, the cost of publishing an ID should be close to zero (not really more than distributing a mail to all mailing list recipients and adding it to the mail archive).
Note that even if an ID is never announced or discussed it can still be valuable later on. After all, the author hands over potentially useful IPR to the IETF Trust (unless I'm not mistaken).
Best regards, Julian _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf