On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:21:00 -0400 Richard M Stallman <rms@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Steve Bellovin wrote: > > Other than giving up the RFC label for Experimental documents, > it's hard to see what the IETF can do. > > Another thing the IETF could do is stop publishing this sort of > document. Anyone that might ask the IETF to publish one can easily > publish it on Internet himself. > > In the cases where an experimental RFC is useful, how is it more > useful for the Internet than publication of the same information in > some other way? Long ago, before search engines, perhaps interested > people would not have found it elsewhere, but that isn't true now. > For the same reason that people publish in conferences and journals -- experimental RFCs are peer-reviewed and accessible via a stable mechanism. Of course, the notion of peer review, especially for for-profit journals, has also been challenged, and for the same reasons you cite. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf