On 2/27/20 5:07 PM, Tom Herbert wrote:
I think we need to be careful that IETF is labeled as a collection of inflexible architectural purists.
There are several problems with the "we should not be architectural purists" argument:
1. It presupposes that there are no significant technical justifications for different components of the infrastructure, or different stacks or applications, to behave consistently with one another, when in fact that very consistency is what permits interoperation at all.
2. IETF's job is not to specify what makes some vendors happy, but to specify what is believed to work well and interoperate, not merely in the short term but also in the long term. Vendors' interests and the interest of the Internet community are not the same thing. While everyone understands that a specification that nobody implements serves no useful purpose, a specification that abandons good sense in order to please (some) vendors does harm to the Internet in the long term by adding more complexity, more operational issues, and more costs that are ultimately borne by users.
3. The perceptions of people outside the IETF should not be considered more important that the technical judgment of those who actually have to make the compromises that go in the specifications. This is not to say that IETF always knows better than everybody else, but rather than the working groups and authors who actually write the specifications have some responsibility to make good compromises, whereas external critics bear no such responsibility.
4. There will always be people insisting that IETF consists of inflexible architectural purists, because this is a standard trope that can be used by anyone who objects to any consensus decision that IETF makes.
Keith
