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Re: draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt

2000-07-20 06:00:04
The bottom line is, the world isn't waiting for us to tell them the
right way to do what they want and the clever solutions we came up with
as solutions to the networking problems of 1970, or 1980, or 1990 don't
demand that they adopt our proposals for solving their problems of 2000.
We're in serious danger of surrendering to the same elitist posturing
for which we used to vilify the mainframe community. Pity, but we'll
have only ourselves to blame if and when the users pass us by...

not that I disagree with you, but this is a fairly content-free statement.
yes, we are seriously deluded if we think that the industry will do 
whatever we say just because we are IETF.  but a similar statement 
could be made of any organization that had been around awhile -
including, for instance, (but by no means specifically) your employer,
a few other large gorillas, telephants, other standards bodies, etc.  
in a free market, *anyone* is in danger of becoming irrelevant.

the reason I say that your statement is content-free is that it offers
no specific criticism of IETF that can be used in a constructive fashion.

I find that the work of IETF varies in quality - much of it is quite
good, some of it mediocre, a small fraction is highly dubious.
Most IETF WGs I've worked with do not operate with an attitude like
"people will have to do what we say", but rather "how do we solve
this problem".  Most of them seem to understand that they have not
only to solve the problem, but also to make the solution technically
sound, attractive to those who would use it, and easy to deploy.

So while I'm not familiar with every area of IETF, I don't see that
IETF as a whole is suffering from the problem you describe.  If
there are specific areas or groups you think are suffering from this
problem, you would do better to direct your criticism to those
areas or groups, to defend your argument with specific examples,
and to provide constructive suggestions for improvement.

Keith