I understood you perfectly. You know as well as I do that y! will
resist any attempts to change the combined draft and with both cisco
and y! behind it (and no open-source backed alternative available
like it was at MARID) it will go through and WG will just make minor
editorial text suggestions.
I certainly hope so. The IETF has an excellent track record at taking
working technology, tidiying up the messy bits, and writing a clear
standard that lets people build implementations that will
interoperate. It has a fairly poor track record at inventing stuff,
which isn't surprising, since invention by committee has rarely worked
anywhere.
Also, I don't understand what you mean by open source here. Yahoo has
published multiple versions of its draft spec, they've offered an open
source compatible patent license, and there are multiple free
implementations that interoperate with the proprietary ones at Yahoo
and Gmail.
R's,
John