John,
Let's assume that Mike O'Dell never submits his idea as an RFC. What then?
It's not just Mike O'Dell who loses. Perhaps he doesn't lose at all, since
he'll be able to reproduce what he wrote from his personal archives. So
while you may argue what's morally correct (and others might argue
otherwise), the fact is that we don't have the document, and that's a loss
to us.
Also, I'm picking on Mike's document (not saying he's right or wrong for
not publishing the doc. as an RFC), but there are many other examples where
this has happened (something similar has happened to a few of my own drafts
that other authors have then asked me to reproduce). Sometimes the ideas
are BAD. More often they're either undeveloped or just so far out that the
standards process doesn't know how to cope with them - YET. Also, quite
frankly, often times a working group will "compromise" away some good
ideas for the sake of expedience in the standards process, and a useful
idea is dropped or neutered, and we've all seen this.
And there have been a number of documents which were meant to discuss an
ephemeral topic, where the author has no intent of going through the
rigmarole of getting the document turned into an RFC.
I think there was great concern about this during IPng, which is why MOST
of those documents eventually turned into RFCs. But even in this VISIBLE
case one has slipped through the cracks.
Eliot
----- Original Message -----
From: John C Klensin <klensin(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
To: Eliot Lear <lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
Cc: <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>; "Mike O'Dell" <mo(_at_)UU(_dot_)NET>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 8:45 AM
Subject: Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference material
--On Thursday, 28 September, 2000 12:02 -0700 Eliot Lear
<lear(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
John,
I would accept your interpretation if you can go to a major
search engine, like Yahoo or Altavista, and find me in a brief
period of time ANY version of Mike O'Dell's 8+8 proposal.
Don't you think it shameful that there is no permanent record
about a serious effort to deal with a serious problem
(multihoming)? And this is a recent (read: current) problem!
Eliot,
I agree with Bob Braden's identification of this particular
document's slipping through the cracks as "shameful" and hope we
can fix it. But, if one looks at the bottom line, Mike
essentially chose to let it expire, and no one else chose to pick
it up and push for RFC publication. The shame lies there, not in
issues with the I-D expiration/ archiving process.
john