I feel that the charter as orignally proposed on September 23rd was a
good charter and should be allowed to proceed.
IMO it left far too many aspects of the approach to be taken unspecified, so
much so that it cannot be used in an exclusionary way to arrive at some form of
consensus.
Naysayers should simply
get off the mailing list and form their own group.
Excuse me, but the IETF is all about getting consensus. Not excluding
dissenting views. Demanding that "naysayers get off the list" is so contrary to
the IETF process it isn't funny.
Now, in those rare cases where it is clear that there's an identifiable
central issue of approach that cannot resolved, the IETF has on occasion
chartered multiple groups to pursue each competing approach. However, what I
see here is not amenable to this trick: We have a bunch of disparate positions
with no clear way of dividing them up. And besides, that's not what you're
proposing: You're proposing that dissenting views simply be told to buzz off,
not that they actually be simultaneously given a place to pursue an
alternative.
We waste way to much bandwidth on irrelevant debate and noise making and
should simply allow the work to move forward. If people have other
alternative solutions, they should not hold back progress on this
clearly chartered work and go pursue their own agendas elsewhere.
At the worst we may create another unused protocol ... However if not
started, it will not ever be available as an option. The IETF is a
darwinian process, we should allow the ideas to be formalized and
documented and then leave it to the market forces to determine adoption.
The Darwinian approach is in fact rarely used in the IETF, and when it is used
it is done in a way that is quite different from what you are advocating. I
will also point out that its use tends to generate loads of ill-will that can
easily damage the prospects of any result. (Any of the many debates on IPv6
deployment that have occured on the main IETF list illustrate this point
nicely.)
Ned