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Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

2000-10-02 00:00:02

On Sat, 30 Sep 2000 20:52:53 -0400, Eric Brunner-Williams 
<brunner(_at_)nic-naa(_dot_)net> said:

  >> And what WG?  Internet Drafts were and are generated by Individuals w/o
  >> benefit of an associated WG. 

  Eric> Precisely my point to Grenville.

Furthermore, the author may have nothing to do with IETF.

The author may just want to circulate an idea to the 
Internet technical community for informal review
or the author may want to publish a none IETF RFC.


Seperation of powers, checks and balances, definition of scope of
responsibility and accountability are the concepts that are missing
from the IETF.


In cults, even simple things get mixed up.


RFC and Internet-Draft (not IETF-Draft) publication and archiving
should be responsibilities of the RFC-Editor. Too bad the RFC-Editor
Complex is mostly Imaginary and very little Real.

I agree with some of Mike's observations:

On Sat, 30 Sep 2000 09:14:25 -0400, "Mike O'Dell" <mo(_at_)UU(_dot_)NET> 
said:

  Mike> ...

  Mike> instead, people decided to continue insisting that
  Mike> reality was as they desired, not as it is.

  Mike> until this get fixed, worrying about any one
  Mike> incident is worse than pointless - it continues
  Mike> the denial.


And to those who want to address protocol patent related issues:

  Is it too wild to suggest that the patent issue can be seperated
  from protocol development and the publication of the 
  proctocol specification?


Something other than IETF which can specialize in promoting and
protecting patent-free protocols could perhaps keep its own repository
of I-Ds and other docs for that particular purpose.

Based on separation of responsibilities we can easily create a highly
dis-centralized and healthy Internet technical community.

In that environemnt, an ill defined entity such as the IETF can then
stick to protocol development (not publication, not patent-freedom,
not commenting on work of others, not ...) and compete with others in
the Internet technical community in the area of patent-free and RFC
published protocol development.


A lesser IETF/IESG/IAB makes a better Internet.


...Mohsen.