On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 01:19:36PM -0700,
Hallam-Baker, Phillip <pbaker(_at_)verisign(_dot_)com> wrote
a message of 50 lines which said:
The Area Director has already stated that the attacks claiming
Microsoft is acting in bad faith are unacceptable.
What I've seen at postings like
http://www.imc.org/ietf-mxcomp/mail-archive/msg02079.html is a recall
of the old IETF legend that people suddenly forget the company they
work for when they post on an IETF mailing list. So, telling you "You
say this because you work for evil Verisign and therefore we should
not listen to you" is unacceptable according to the above statement.
But is does not and should not prevent people from discussing the
activities or the statements of Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign or AFNIC,
the organizations, at least when it has a direct consequence on a
current IETF activity.
It is interesting to see that the discussion on the same issue (rms'
statement) has been much more professionnal (nobody was threatened to
be kicked off) on the private SPF mailing list
(http://archives.listbox.com/spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com/200407/0814.html)
than on the consensus-driven IETF MARID mailing list.
This type of behavior is very damaging both to the group and to the
IETF. It makes it much harder to achieve an acceptable license. All
it takes is a Microsoft manager to decide that they do not want it
to appear that they are being dictated to and it is game over.
I thought that the already mentioned legend "all the participants are
individuals and represent no corporation, government or other type of
organization" was issued to avoid political discussions to distract
people from actual work on the standard. And then, you say that we
should adopt such or such viewpoint purely for tactical reasons?
If you drag the discussion on this ground, I would say that I'm
skeptical: Microsoft seems to be very eager to have an official IETF
endorsment for Sender-ID. See, for instance,
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/jun04/06-24SIDSpecIETFPR.asp.