At 12:11 PM 11/3/97 GMT, Lutz Donnerhacke wrote:
So IDEA as SHOULD would guarantee backward compatibility? Fine. I'd prefer
MUST, but I see the problem.
Alas, it doesn't. The only thing that guarantees interoperability is MUST,
and you can't have a MUST algorithm that's got intellectual property
constraints, if there is an alternative.
When we started the BOF in Munich, we had as one of the OP goals "limited
backwards compatibility." What we meant by this was that we wouldn't even
consider backwards compatibility with anything before 2.6, we even think
that 2.6 should eventually be migrated/upgraded/phased out for security
reasons, and we knew that even 2.6 compatibility is not possible given IETF
because 2.6 used *only* encumbered algorithms. Thus, we put in the
weasel-words "limited backwards compatibility."
The bottom line is that we cannot be both an IETF standard and have
guaranteed backward compatibility with 2.6.
Jon
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