Hello,
For information about the facilitators experiment, please see
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg97290.html This
message contains a rough summary of the thread at
https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99087.html
According to Mr Taht, a frequent topic of conversation during the
last meeting was about how to get more open source involvement in
standards orgs. He mentioned several non-IETF conferences in the
hope that some IETF participants would be interested in them. There
was a comment from Ms Woolf about DNS and open source. Ms Shore
commented that the IETF does not do APIs [1]. Mr Carpenter's
response was that protocols without APIs are pretty much useless
these days. Mr Hammer commented about the speed at which IETF
working groups move and the speed at which many open source projects
move. Mr Alvarez asked whether the discussion was about open source
implementations of IETF standards or open source people gathered at
IETF conferences. Mr Livingood responded using what his team did at
Bits & Bites as an example [2]. Ms Atlas commented that coming to an
understanding of the perspectives of all those interested in the work
can take time and discussion [3]. Mr
Zeeb commented about a RFC used by Mr Carpenter as an example and
mentioned that it is a sad story [4]. He also started a different
discussion about an open source model for publishing and obsoleting RFCs.
Mr Taht considers that standardizing something takes a lot of
resources, a lot of different kinds of people, a lot of time, and a
lot of things that should happen in parallel that end up happening in
sequence and shared his thought about the concept of a "funded
working group" [5]. There were a few comments about how long it
takes to get a document published as a RFC in response to a comment
from Mr Hammer about politics and religious wars stretching the
time-to-publish to several years. Mr Hammer also commented that, to
some extent, IETF is driven by people who are paid by their
organizations to be full time IETFers [6]. Ms Atlas does not think
that there are that many people who are full time IETFers. Mr Eggert
mentioned an issue with code which comes with a license such as
GPL. Mr Carpenter commented about an IETF-friendly license if an
IETF WG sponsors code development. Mr Ewell commented that a spec
must be expressed in prose, tables, formulas, pseudocode, flowcharts,
ABNF, what have you, not in actual code in an actual programming
language. Mr Taht commented about the advantages to the GPL (and
LGPL) over "standardization". Mr Farrell agreed with Mr Eggert about
GPL clearly having issues for some IETF participants, and argued that
GPL is far from useless. Mr Bernardini commented that GPL'ed code
could, as a second implementation, provide a useful check for interoperability.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99093.html
2. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99134.html
3. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99099.html
4. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99101.html
5. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99106.html
6. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg99109.html