Hi Melinda, On Jan 22, 2013, at 9:05 AM, Melinda Shore wrote: > there's general agreement that options are not a good thing and > a pretty decent understanding of the issues around complexity, but > there's many a slip, etc. It may seem to be very easy to agree with you on that point. However, the story isn't that simple as it first seems to be. For example: For SIP there are many different key distribution protocols being specified (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5479 and http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-avtcore-rtp-security-options-01). Why are there so many different ways to distribute keys for usage with SRTP? Why cannot we just have one solution and always use it? It turns out that there are many reasons, including different properties of individual solutions, designed by other organizations (e.g., 3GPP) and nobody wanted to upset them, IPRs, different architectural assumptions (e.g., regarding regulatory requirements), etc. Even the question whether SRTP should be mandated is already complicated as discussed in http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-avt-srtp-not-mandatory/ Another example from a different area: Why do we need so many transition technologies for the migration from IPv4 to IPv6? Wouldn't it be less complex to just have one transition mechanism? Yet another example: Diameter supports TCP and SCTP. RADIUS initially supported UDP only and later added support for TCP. Couldn't the RADIUS guys just have used Diameter if they want to use a reliable transport? Ciao Hannes