On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 13:17 -0800, Marc Petit-Huguenin wrote: > I would like to bring to your attention this proposal to put back > running code at the center of Internet protocol design by adding a > new Considerations Section in future Internet-Drafts and RFCs: > > http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-petithuguenin-running-code-considerations-00.txt I oppose the addition of such a mandatory or formalized section, despite the fact that I very much support measuring specification quality and community support by looking for running code. I oppose even more this part of the definition of "running code": The minimum rights that should be granted for this source code are the right to duplicate it for purpose of reading it and the right to execute it or generate the binary code to execute it. I spend nearly all my time and energy these days on open source software, so this would not be a barrier for me, but it would be for many people whose contributions are important. More importantly, I have no need (or desire) to look at the source code for an implementation to determine whether or not it matches the specification and interoperates with other implementations. It is behavior on the wire that we are concerned with in the IETF - we don't specify how a protocol is implemented, we specify the behavior it exhibits. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf