John,
... a large fraction of the
community (probably a majority) had concluded that TCP/IP was
OBE. ...
... we would have shut down
(or never started) any work on XMPP ...
Right.
You also wrote in another mail:
I do, however, have a concern that he didn't mention (and might
not agree with). While I am generally in favor of the IESG's
telling the community about how it thinks about issues, there is
a fuzzy boundary between doing that and trying to create more
and more rules and mechanisms in the hope that those can be
substituted for careful judgment. There isn't quite enough
information in this statement for me to be sure how the IESG
intends to use it (that is not a complaint), but I fear it will
lie on the "more rules" rather than "better explanation" side of
the boundary.
That is something that I also care about. Note that the statement says
almost nothing about the real reasons for being OBE; the IESG and the
community need to apply judgment in making such decisions.
For instance, what is a "non-problem"? We have to be very careful about
that. For instance, I think it would be inappropriate to declare an
application as something addressing a non-problem when its only used by
a small number of people. Its hard to predict usage patterns, and what
seems to be "winning" right now may be dead tomorrow, and vice versa. A
far more workable rule for continuing IETF work is whether the group
actually invests cycles in it, progresses specifications, produces
technically sound solutions, has running code, and so on. Even the most
non-OBE WG may have to be terminated, if no one is doing work.
But where these decisions get difficult is when the different indicators
give you a different answer. For instance, if you have an active WG that
has half a dozen implementations and is making progress with its
specifications, but everyone else in the IETF believes we do not need
it, the WG has hard remaining issues in its specifications, or that the
results may even be harmful in some context. There is no easy answer in
such cases.
Jari
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