<<On Wed, 20 Sep 2000 20:05:52 -0400, Mark Allman
<mallman(_at_)grc(_dot_)nasa(_dot_)gov> said:
So, lots of places have facilities for publishing technical reports.
If an I-D author believes that something should be kept around but
Whether the author wants it to be kept around or not is immaterial.
As a practical matter, many I-Ds are in fact archived -- in the
archives of the various mailing-lists in which their contents are
discussed. However, such archives have decided disadvantages as the
canonical references for an old draft.
This issue is whether other people (historians, journalists,
documenters) can create, in their own *permanent* works, a permanent
reference to the contents of an Internet-Draft.
Even as an implementor, if I write code to implement a technique or
protocol described in an Internet-Draft, I want that draft to stay
around at least as long as the revision history of that code lasts
(possibly ten or twenty years) -- and if the IETF won't provide that
permanence, I might as well just plonk the draft down in my repository
alongside the code. (Whether the code implementing the draft is ever
formally released or not is immaterial -- for many of us in the OSS
community, ``releases'' are effectively instantaneous.)
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same
wollman(_at_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu | O Siem / The fires of freedom
Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame
MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick