> I personally think that the "wider technical community" of potential RFC publishers is a pious myth. I think it already was during the Arpanet project: the wider community included a bunch of non-US research networks, but these researchers rarely published in the RFC series, if at all. For example, how many RFC did Louis Pouzin author? Most of modern digital identity left the IETF to go work elsewhere. This stuff all used to happen in PKIX, but later incarnations of the same ideas happened in OASIS, Kantara, the OpenIDC and to some extent the FIDO alliance. There were several reasons why the IETF never attracted these groups, one of which was undoubtedly different views on IPR. Equally important the communities involved simply had their focal point elsewhere and had no reason to come to IETF meetings to do work. There is no objective reason why those standards could not have published as RFCs. This may have required several independent RFC streams though. Its fair to ask if anything of value has really been lost - after all all that stuff got done anyway. Cheers Leif
