I find the archives very useful, especially when you have your own I-D
history and contribution to WG works perhaps. It helps to show
different views, the synergism, the competitive engineering views, the
history, etc behind the final development of WG work.
Whenever I do find a need to reference them in the eDiscussion, I will
make sure I parenthetically note they are expired information.
My input is limited due to legal reasons and try to keep with public
domain technology exchanges and communications.
I can understand if an expired I-D touches base with some level of IP
that may be conflictive in the future, i.e. someone does a patent
search/research and finds prior art in an expired I-D and it may be
advantageous to them to have it removed from the archives. However,
this is what the lawyers and courts are for. I'm sure the IETF/IESG
archive keepers can also make judgment calls but I don't think it will
be harmful to keep them around until it became a legal issue and like
everything else, dealt on a case by case basis.
I will say that I like to believe (maybe I am naive) the IETF/IESG
does represents the community at large and I like to believe it
represent even the "Small Guys" that really is not interested in the
politics and battles.
John C Klensin wrote:
--On Thursday, September 13, 2012 00:19 -0700 Joe Touch
<touch@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 9/13/2012 12:02 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
On 9/12/2012 11:30 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
But nothing in the above, nor in the text you cite, requires
that _keep_ imply "guarantee to have available for retrieval
over the network by any interested party, with no requirement
for a special request".
It's interesting how this line of analysis entirely ignores
pragmatics.
It has been noted by a number of folk that public access has
repeatedly been demonstrated to be... useful.
That's why they were made accessible.
d/
PirateBay believes this too, and helps make movies available
for public access, honoring pragmatics.
Good luck with that line of reasoning.
Let me try that a different way. Suppose someone were to
propose that ISOC increase the subsidy to IETF sufficiently to
drop all registration fees. That would certainly be "useful".
It would be useful to those who have to pay those fees out of
their own pockets, increasing the costs of attendance and making
it harder to attend. It would be useful to those who have to
justify travel budgets and expenses. One might even suggest
that it would be useful to everyone who wasn't interested in
using the rising costs of IETF meetings to keep people out.
It would perhaps be even more useful to offer a distance-based
cash subsidy to anyone who has to travel more than, say, 3000
miles to an IETF meeting. That would not only be useful to
individuals, but would be useful in balancing out the
differential cost effects of meeting location choices and hence
in improving geographical balance in meetings.
Are there pragmatic reasons to not do either of these useful
things? Sure there are. But they would definitely be
pragmatically useful.
The questions about the public archive aren't "do people find
this useful?" but "does the utility of having the archive public
outweigh the costs and risks?" And, if the answer to the
second question is even only "maybe", "can we analyze the real
needs and determine other ways to meet them, such as by keeping
expired drafts available for a relatively short time after
expiration rather than forever, with authors having an opt-out
option?".
best,
john
--
HLS